IT companies to reboot today, albeit cautiously

The Information and Technology (IT) industry, the hub of Bangalore, played it safe on Thursday by announcing holidays or shutting down early in anticipation of any sort of backlash from fringe groups in the wake of the Ayodhya verdict.

Work at offices of major IT companies – Infosys Technologies, Wipro, MindTree Ltd and others in the city will return to normal on Friday after the judgment on the disputed land passed off peacefully.

Most companies either worked for half-a-day or declared a holiday as a precautionary measure. Nandita Gurjar, vice president of HR department at Infosys said all Infy offices would function “normally.”

S Janakiraman, president and group CEO, product engineering services of MindTree Ltd, said his company has decided to operate normally “unless the ground situation gets bad.”

“We have told our employees to gauge the situation (on Friday). If there is no violence reported then they should take it as normal working day,” he said.
“We were given official instructions to work from home on Thursday. So we didn’t take the risk of coming to office to avoid any untoward incident,” Nandish Ramegowda, a senior software professional at Cisco Systems, said.
Bharma Nanda Padhy, another IT professional working with Wipro, said that their office functioned only for half day.

“The office functioned till early afternoon and was later declared closed,” said Padhy.

However, many decided to take leave on Thursday, to avoid getting into any trouble.

“Our office worked half the day. Still, I did not want to take any risk, so I applied for a day’s leave,” Sudeshna Sarkar, an IT professional working with Dell, said.