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Business

Coronavirus impact: Nasscom says ensuring customers that the new model will work important

Updated : March 30, 2020 06:59 PM IST

One thousand and seventy one - that's the total number of confirmed cases in India as of this morning with 942 active cases, according to the ministry of health. 99 patients have been discharged while the death toll stands at 29.

Uttar Pradesh, Kerala and Delhi have seen the biggest spike in the number of cases in the last 24 hours. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) continues to maintain that COVID-19 has not entered the community transmission phase yet.

With the nation-wide lockdown to contain the spread of the virus entering the sixth day, cabinet secretary Rajiv Gauba has dismissed reports that the government may be looking at extending the 21-day lockdown, which ends on April 14.

Meanwhile, the exodus of migrant workers continues to be a challenge. The Centre has already ordered all states and union territories to ensure migrant workers are not allowed to cross state borders and to quarantine migrant workers who have reached their borders for a mandatory 2 weeks. According to government estimates, around 3 lakh migrant workers have breached the lockdown and hit the roads.

Today, A CJI-led Supreme Court (SC) bench refused to pass any orders on a PIL seeking relief for these migrant workers. It has given the government one day to file a status report on the measures that it has taken in this regard. The court observed that this migration of labourers, which is a result of panic and fear, has become a bigger problem than the coronavirus itself.

The Indian IT industry is also struggling to cope with the COVID-19 outbreak. This, despite a home ministry advisory asking states to permit the IT and ITeS industry to carry out functions linked to providing essential services like banking. Besides the movement of people, the industry is also grappling with costs, and top industry sources tell us that cost rationalisation could be a reality for many.

Sharing her outlook on the road ahead for IT and ITes industry, Debjani Ghosh, the president of industry body NASSCOM said, "We are taking it as one-day at a time and as an industry, our priority is the safety of employees. How do we ensure that we get pretty much as close to 90-95 percent of our employees safely to their homes so they can work from home and keep only what is required to run critical services like banking, hospitals etc."

"The most important thing for us right now is to ensure that once we are done with this, we work with clients, we reach out to our customers, we talk to our customers and we ensure they understand that we are committed to making this new model work,” she said.

“For our kind of work, disruption in power supply is huge. So, we do expect a lot of challenges and we are doing our best to talk to every state to figure out how we can safeguard ourselves against these challenges and the biggest task is to ensure that our clients don’t suffer, they don’t feel the impact of this transition that we are going through and we are able to continue to support them,” she added.

“It gets better day by day. Initially when the lockdown was announced, employee movement was completely stopped in most states. We had to work overnight with every single state government and not just state government, district collectors, police commissioners to make them understand what is required to ensure that these essential services continue but companies have been just going out to ensure that there is no disruption and so far we have not heard of a big fiasco as yet and I hope we don’t,” said Ghosh.

Talking about the road ahead, she further mentioned, “We are all expecting the global gross domestic product (GDP) to get hit. The pundits are coming out with all sorts of ranges from 5 percent to 10 percent etc. So we know that the global GDP is definitely going to get hit and I don’t want to put a number to it right now because it is still too early and we are still trying to figure out what the real impact will be on the global GDP on one hand and then on our sector.”

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