American tech giant, Cognizant announced that the company will pay an additional 25 percent of the base pay to the employees in India and the Philippines for the month of April due to the current pandemic.
Currently, the tech giant has around 2,00,000 employees in India. According to sources, the additional pay will be paid to the employees up to the Associate level which will cover more than two-thirds of the workforce in India.
CEO of Cognizant, Brian Humphries stated, “Our global company has a long history of operating virtually and remotely, and rallying and responding around the clock, wherever needed. As you’ve seen, India’s Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi has imposed a nationwide 21-day lockdown in an attempt to contain the spread of the coronavirus. The Philippines is under a state of national emergency. We support these and other efforts by governments across the world to “flatten the curve” and contain the spread of COVID-19.”
According to Humphries, the tech giant has already enabled safety measures like working from home for the majority of its offshore teams to ensure employee health and safety, and to maintain continuity of service for its clients, while safeguarding their data and protecting access to their systems. The work from home measures includes provisioning new laptops and encrypting desktops and moving them to associate homes, enabling the use of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), providing additional bandwidth connectivity and air cards — all with the appropriate client permissions and security protocols.
