THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: With IT companies in Technopark here entertaining work-from-home culture since the pandemic hit, the past 10 months have been a nightmare for people running non-IT businesses inside the park. Since the lockdown was imposed in March last year, all the shops, including restaurants, in Technopark have stayed closed. The work-from-home policy adopted by the government and IT firms has hit around 50 vendors who depend on the techies for revenue.
While the government intervened and provided the vendors a three-month rent waiver from April to June last year, the Technopark authorities later asked them to either pay the pending rent or quit.“Around 50 shops, including restaurants, in Technopark depended on techies. Now, our future looks bleak,” said Tigy Tankachan, secretary, Technopark Vendors Association (TVA). “Even IT companies are promoting work from home as they are making profits and the productivity of employees is good. None is concerned about our plight,” he said.
The Group of Technology Companies (GTech), the industry body of IT and Business Process Management organisations in Kerala, has said employees can come to office after getting vaccinated. While the decision would benefit the vendors, they are unsure about an immediate turnaround in their situation.Most of the vendors are engineers and other professionals providing support services like restaurants, automatic car wash, laundromats and tailoring shops.
“We cater to several techies and our services are exclusively offered to employees in Technopark. We are fully dependent on them. We invested substantially in our ventures and are employing over 1,000 people in all the units, besides indirectly employing more than 3000 people. Though we reopened some restaurants in January, we could not make decent revenue,” Tigy said. Vineeth Sankar, a laundry shop owner in Technopark, said all the shops closed in March last year, immediately after the state government announced the lockdown.
“We immediately sent our employees home and paid them salaries for a few months. Now, we have no resources to pay them. Since our shops are inside Technopark, there is a standing instruction from authorities that we cannot cater to people outside. We are fully dependent on employees here,” said Vineeth.
The TVA filed a memorandum in January before Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, ministers Kadakampally Surendran and T M Thomas Isaac, the IT secretary and the Technopark CEO seeking exemption from rent till March. However, it is yet to get a response. IT secretary Mohammed Y Safirulla told TNIE that the requests of non-IT establishments are under the government’s consideration.
“We already gave them a six-month waiver from April 2020. They have submitted a petition now and it is under the government’s consideration,” he said. Vendors said they got only a three-month waiver.
Technopark CEO Sasi Meethal said Technopark too has raised the concerns before the government and is awaiting its final call.