Google Ngram Viewer seems to agree, putting peak usage of "do the needful" in the mid-1800s. A phrase I would tend to use instead, "do what is needed", appears

Google Ngram Viewer seems to agree, putting peak usage of "do the needful" in the mid-1800s. A phrase I would tend to use instead, "do what is needed", appears to be much more recent. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=do+the+needful%2Cdo+what+is+needed&year_start=1700&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=do+the+needful...