Analysts have stated recently, those technology captives of global organisations in India see a sharp fall in productivity as a majority of the employees have started working from home. In fact, some IT captives focused on the travel industry are suggesting employees take unpaid leave for months.
Currently, India houses more than 1,200 such GICs and majority of them are focused on technology development.
According to Pareekh Jain, the founder of Pareekh Consulting “GICs have faced challenges in finishing some existing projects. Their parent companies are holding back on the discretionary spend. The ongoing lockdown in the country will hit productivity.” The GICs, however, are continuing some of the critical development work, added Jain.
Tremendous productivity has also been hit for the captives of the banking and financial services sector due to the COVID-19 lockdown in India. Sabre, a travel industry-focused tech services company, has suggested some of its employees can opt for three-month unpaid leave without any concerns of their job post the lockdown.
Experts believe that the IT captives are well placed to mitigate this crisis compared with the IT services companies, but they could see hiring freeze for some time going forward. Lalit Ahuja, the founder of ANSR, also said, “We haven’t reached a stage yet where we can see layoffs. These captives or these technology capacity centres over-invested in robust business continuity infrastructure and allowed employees to work from home.”
It is believed that these captives would want to do things in a cost-effective manner considering the global economic slowdown. Some captives are also proactively making plans to get back to growth once the Covid-19 pandemic situation improves. At the same time captive centre of Telstra, Australian telecom major, has seen more work coming to India facilities as their Philippines units are shut amid Coronavirus outbreak, said analysts.
“Telstra has a well-established business resilience programme to provide an effective response and recovery capabilities in the event of any disruption to our business operations,” said NT Arunkumar, India Delivery & Innovation Executive for Telstra.
