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India's IT businesses are scrambling to deal with the COVID-19 surge with war rooms and oxygen.
source : reuters
As they scramble to procure oxygen, drugs, and hospital beds for infected staff while maintaining backroom operations for the world's largest financial firms, India's giant IT firms in Bengaluru and other cities have set up COVID-19 "war-rooms."
Banks such as Goldman Sachs (GS.N) and Standard Chartered (STAN.L), which have large office parks in Bengaluru, Chennai, or Hyderabad and operate most of their global back office operations from there, have placed in place facilities to vaccinate thousands of employees and their families when age limits are lifted on May 1.
Accenture (ACN.N), Infosys (INFY.NS), and Wipro (WIPR.NS) employees say their teams are working 13-14 hours a day, under the pressure, and failing to deliver on projects as employees call in sick or take time off to care for friends and relatives.
They downplay the risk of a systemic failure, but if the boom continues, the infrastructure placed in place by the world's biggest financial firms as part of cost-cutting efforts that have left them dependent on India's major offices is at risk.
"Employees have contracted COVID-19 since the second wave began, causing severe pressure for projects that are nearing deadlines," said one employee at Accenture, asking not to be identified because he was not authorised to speak to the media.
Five other Accenture sources reported the rise in work-related stress. Accenture said it was offering some medical insurance and covering the cost of vaccines for its workers, but it didn't say how this will affect efficiency.
Wipro said there has been no disruption to operations and that some client projects have been moved to offices outside India.
Only about 3% of its nearly 200,000 workers are now working from home on important tasks, and the company expects more of them to do so in the future. Wipro said it had made arrangements for those who needed to work from the office to stay in nearby guest houses and hotels.
Despite the country's worsening health situation in recent weeks, Infosys, India's second largest software services company, said it was running remotely across all offices and had not seen any effects on client ventures.
Similarly, India's top information technology (IT) services company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS.NS), said its operations were unaffected.
For the past week, at least 300,000 people have tested positive in India's second wave of infections, overwhelming healthcare facilities and crematoriums and prompting an increasingly urgent international response.
Bengaluru, Asia's IT capital, ordered a complete lockdown on Monday, allowing ordinary citizens to leave their homes only briefly between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., in an attempt to calm a daily infection rate five times higher than in last year's first wave.
Local IT managers say they had difficulty persuading global leaders outside of India to acknowledge the outbreak's gravity.
'WAR ROOMS' COVID-19
India's massive IT and call center service industry directly employs over 4.5 million people and relies heavily on graduates under the age of 30.
They are paid a fraction of Western wages and had largely waited out the COVID-19 pandemic by operating from home before recent constraints were eased, prompting more workers to return to work.
Managers at Goldman Sachs' vast Bengaluru complex, for example, told employees in early March that they should expect to return to full-time office work.
The bank owed it to its new class of analysts and interns, according to Chief Executive Officer David Solomon, to make them come to work in offices for at least part of the summer. As cases started to mount, the company rapidly reversed course, sending all but the most important workers home on March 27.
Wells Fargo, another large bank, said its employees in India will continue to function remotely at least until early September.
Since then, new strains of the virus have pushed India's case numbers to new highs, causing more infections among the country's youth.
All 15 of the major corporations contacted by Reuters this week said they had implemented vaccination programs. Several described COVID-19 "war-rooms" that they had set up to help workers and secure oxygen and other supplies.
Managers outside India initially did not want their companies' Indian operations to be seen as skipping the vaccine queue, according to a senior manager who oversees a workforce of over 600 people at a global bank in Bengaluru, who did not want to be named.
"The India CEO and others here said: we don't care what it looks like, people are dying."
