BANGALORE: The tech hub turned a ghost town on Wednesday, with the outsourcing industry shutting down over fears of violence due to a bandh call by Kannada activists, who were protesting over the Belgaum border dispute with Maharashtra.
The IT industry which employs over four lakh people including firms like Infosys, Wipro, Intel and Texas Instruments, chose the option to work over this weekend, and declared a holiday on Wednesday, fearing a repeat of mob violence witnessed by Bangalore in April.
Call centres operated on a skeletal staff, who had stayed overnight in their offices, and routed most calls to their operations in other cities like Hyderabad and Chennai. It is a norm of Indian IT and BPO firms to shift work over multiple centres to handle disasters and exigencies such as strikes. “We have taken necessary action to ensure that operations are not affected by moving volumes to our centres in Chennai and Hyderabad and our international centres,” Pradeep Narayan, Chief Delivery Officer of 24/7 Customer said.
The 12-hour dawn-to-dusk bandh was peaceful in Bangalore, but for stray incidents of violence in some districts of Karnataka, as normal life crippled for the second time in six months. Government offices, schools, colleges and shopping markets remained closed, while buses and autos were off roads. Cable operators blanked all non-Kannada channels including news channels. “The state is peaceful. No untoward incidents were reported,” Karnataka Director General of Police B S Sial said.
The software hub saw its ugly side when eight people, including a policeman, were killed in mob violence following Kannada film icon Dr Rajkumar’s death in April last, which brought to fore the ‘digital divide’ of locals versus outsiders in the city. The strike called by Karnataka Border Agitation Committee.
