The Indian IT industry body NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies) is known to create a healthy business environment, promoting talent, easing policies and more for the IT-BPM industries. With the ongoing pandemic, NASSCOM has asked the government for a financial relief package so companies of Business Process Management (BPM) could save employees jobs and those that no longer have jobs in Global in-house Centres (GICs).
Due to the lockdown, a lot of companies are deferring on payments and subjecting salary cuts since the business has come to a halt worldwide.
Nasscom has put forth the suggestion that employees that are benched be paid minimum wages with their statutory entitlements. Like in the UK, the body has recommended the government to use a furlough scheme where people continue to remain employees of the company but do not receive the salary during the lockdown.
They also asked the government to consider PF contributions of certain employees as well as companies for the next 3 months.
The lockdown is expected to be lifted by April 15th and most fear it will be a time of job cuts since the IT industry has more than 20% of its staff working from home. They are operating at only 70% of their overall capacity and hence, salary cost would be huge says NASCOMM to a national daily.
The IT/BPM segment has its strongest market in the US and UK, which are heavily affected by the outbreak of the pandemic. Overall, the IT/BPM industry has 4 million employees and the BPM segment accounts for 1 million of it with its services such as finance, accounting, payroll, procurement, HR, supply chain, etc.
Some hints our of NASSCOM data suggest that the vulnerability would be faced by around 4 lakh employees that would have to take a basic pay of 12,000. Together, the government and industry will have to raise Rs 480 crore package to sustain the industry during these tough times.
