CHENNAI: The disruption of power and telecommunication lines due to the cyclone Vardah has hit the information technology sector with many outsourcing their key projects to other cities.
“We have lost a few days of work. We still have some network and electricity issues which need to be sorted urgently,” said NASSCOM vice-president K Purushotamman.
Interestingly, nearly five days have passed and many firms in Siruseri and Sholinganallur are struggling with power and connectivity issues.Some IT firms like TCS have asked their employees to temporarily shift to Pune office to take care of important projects.
An employee of Wipro Limited on the Old Mahabalipuram Road in Sholinganallur said that after the cyclone hit power supply at their premises, employees have been given permission to work from home.
For some projects where it was not possible or in some cases when employees did not have facilities for remote access due to lack of internet or a computer, they have been asked to work from the company’s branches in Hyderabad and Bangalore.
“But even before the company granted permission, many employees began leaving since there was no access to water in their accommodations due to lack of power,” said an employee.
Purushottaman says that large areas of Siruseri and Sholingannalur, where most of IT firms are located, are s facing power and network issues.
The firms are finding their own way to sustain during the crisis. In Siruseri, where the power issues are yet to be sorted out, TCS is running through power backup system.
However, Purushotamman said that the priority of the government is, of course, the common man and business comes next. “We hope as the common man’s issues are addressed, our issues will also be addressed soon,” he added.
Interestingly, the blackout post-Vardha has resulted in huge losses to IT sector but experts have yet to quantify it.
Sources in Cognizant, where the operations are up and running now, said that the day the cyclone struck and the day after, they too faced networking and power issues and shifted work to other centres as a precautionary measure. “But this has been sorted out and currently we are up and running,” the source added.
Even a brief downtime in an IT firm could, apart from monetary losses, result in corruption of software, loss of data and inability to connect with clients. In a country like India, where a firm suffers from 14 power outages in a typical month, according to the World Bank data in 2014, the power back-up in firms are usually robust.
L&T’s Shipbuilding also suffered a setback, according to an employee, who said that since their servers were down for a day after the cyclone, the updated bill of materials could not be sent. Bill of materials is a list of raw materials, sub-assemblies and sub-components that are required to assemble a product in a production firm.
As a result, the company’s production plant in Kattupalli was hit, said the employee.
Operations in Kamarajar Port have been affected as power and telecommunication services were hit.
The Oil refinery in Ennore also could not continue its operations due to network issues and the tankers have to be diverted to Korukkupet refinery, sources added.