Indian IT Industry: The Dark Side Of The Moon ...

This article is dedicated to all those big Indian IT giants, who claim to be the bellwether of Indian economy by posting growth story worth million dollars every quarter. They claim to be the rescuer of our otherwise stagnating economy and aim to bring India strongly on global map by generating enormous job opportunities for our young population, enabling us to reap the benefits of our demographic dividend. This superficial story seems to be all rosy and fills you with a sense of pride, being an Indian.
However if we delve deeper into this fairy tale, we realize ‘the dark side of the moon’. Indian IT industry is mainly about services and solutions that these companies provide to their customers, spanning all over globe. The geographical advantage of having located just opposite to US (the biggest market), on globe (for 24/7 work), availability of cheap labor and few emerging Indian companies in this field, have really propelled the growth in this sector, especially in post globalization era.
The business is growing aggressively on the abilities of these companies to find the untapped potential in new sectors, banking, retail, Insurance to name a few. And so is their intake of employees. Few companies are even going to the extent of hiring almost fifty thousand people per year. So they have a big force of employee and growing every year. Being a service based entity; the primary focus of these companies rightly is on customer satisfaction, so as to bring more value to customers and business to the company. But among the hullabaloo of customer satisfaction and race of earning more revenues, the employee satisfaction takes a severe beating. These so called altruistic companies claim to follow all the laws of land on paper, but actually bend each one of them for their own benefits. And among all this noise of growth story and billion dollars revenues, the ultimate loser is the employee.
Almost everywhere (except a few generous ones ) ,employees are paid for eight or nine hours but are made to work for twelve to fifteen hours every day and in many cases on weekends too. And the higher authorities justify it by calling it ‘going beyond the call of duty’. The employees in most cases lose their personal lives (health, relationship, peace of mind) just to keep themselves alive in this rat race. And this does not happen for a day or two or for a month. It happens as long as someone is there. A psychological propaganda is spread inside these organizations, where anybody opposing it, is either thrown out or subjected to severe mental pressure leading to anxiety, frustration and depression. I mean what is the meaning of paying someone handsomely at the cost of one’s rights to live.
There is no denying this fact that customer satisfaction is the primary goal of any service based company and it must be ensured with the best efforts. But isn't there any meaning of ‘employee satisfaction’? After all its employees, who are the basic building blocks of this growth story. And an employee is as much human as a customer. Then why are they subjected to such dual standards? We must come out of this colonial exploitative mentality.
If there are more work and business coming in, wouldn't it be a noble idea to hire more number of people instead of pressurizing the existing ones to stretch? Wouldn't it be nice for our economy and our growing demography? And in longer run more number of employees will eventually be able to generate more revenue. It’s a win-win situation for everyone .But for this to happen, these companies will have to come out of their ‘revenue-generation-at-any-cost’ mentality.
Since IT industry is our primary vehicle of growth and is covering more and more people in its ambit, we need to address these reforms, period. The reforms that address the human side of people working in such places. And for a change , we need to consider that the person sitting next to that computer is a human , not a machine.