IT & Employment

The much talked about subject today, the Satyam saga, poses many more questions about the whole corporate governance hullabaloo in the Indian IT industry. The reason for calling it hullabaloo is that last year Satyam was awarded Golden Peacock award for corporate excellence. With the latest discoveries in the case, now they say that even the total employee number in Satyam is also not 53000 as claimed by the annual report, but it is about 40000 & that number was inflated to siphon off money every month.

This is not a small number, the 1/4^th of the staff is fictitious and yet not one person in company raised any eyebrows on it. What are the HR people doing? We are raising questions about the audit people, but we don’t smell the rats that are still sitting in there, employed permanently. This raises questions about the recruiting practices in the IT industry. The already fraught about question is about the bench strength in IT. Hiring the best of the talents in the market & making them sit without work is inhuman & so is hiring them on contract or on vendors roll just to offload them whenever necessary, without much consequence.

The reason to employ people on contract or on vendor’s roll is lack of labour reforms in the country. In India we are not accepting ‘Hire & Fire’ policy for any company. So this is open detour found out by the innovative IT giants in the country. There is no exception to this method, not even the sacrosanct ‘Infosys’. There are so many people being let go by these IT giants in this recessionary time, simply because they needed to save the skin of their on roll, permanent employees. God knows if they are being accounted for! The HR professionals in these companies have become the most despicable people.

No one will raise questions about the ability of the people working on contract or on vendor’s roll, as they all go through the same rigorous process of selection. They would not be in the position if they were not good enough. Another fact anyone cannot deny that these non-employees are the ones who work the hardest in the company with fear & expectation that some day their efforts will be recognized. But when the times like today come, they are made the scapegoats in order to ‘save the costs’. Performance is not the criterion for this dismissal of services. With evidence it can be proved that their performance is better than most of the permanent, on roll staff working on similar positions.

This injustice has to be stopped. Now if all of them were permanent, on roll employees & if Indian labour law allowed ‘Hire & Fire’ policy, all IT giants would be required to rethink a lot before letting these people go and the only criterion for that would be lack of performance. At least there would be a mechanism to address the grievances of the people being asked to leave. Also there would not be any suspicious IT vendors whose only job is to beguile people into work on such high risk profiles, where contradictory to rule the returns are very low for the people who actually bear all the risk. The ‘bull-shit’ in the HR practices in IT industry has to stop. In my opinion the Satyam employee fraud would have been committed through similar means. These contract or off-roll methods have to be stopped or brought under better scrutiny & take my word for it, many more frauds in Indian IT industry will be brought in the daylight.

If at all India is thriving to be a superpower in coming years, first thing they need to do is to get the employment laws in the country right. I know, this would get their cost a little up, but it will not jeopardize the cost competitiveness of Indian companies & instead it will bring in some transparency & in turn brand value in the most ill-organized part of organizations – employment & HR!