The Hindu Business Line : Gujjar agitation: BPOs switch to back-up plans to avert disruption

BPOs put monitoring teams in place to keep an eye on the movement of traffic on roads, while the heads of various companies were seen closely monitoring the situation.

Moumita Bakshi Chatterjee

New Delhi, May 29 Even as the Gujjar protest echoed in the capital on Thursday, most of the business process outsourcing (BPO) companies located in the National Capital Region claimed that operations were near-normal but only because advance contingency planning allowed them to avert disruption.

However, some BPOs saw a drop in the employee turnout — even half the normal level in certain cases — prompting companies to utilise employees residing closer to office.

“We knew that there could be a problem and so we planned in advance to re-route the cabs. Where there was no option, we took up guesthouses for employees.

“The planning helped us to keep the business going and we did not have to resort to re-routing of work or calls to other locations,” Mr Pramod Bhasin, President and Chief Executive Officer of Genpact, said.

BPOs put monitoring teams in place to keep an eye on the movement of traffic on roads, while the heads of various companies were seen closely monitoring the situation.

“Our vehicles for pick-up and drop left an hour earlier than the scheduled time. While our clients did not feel any impact, these situations put pressure on resources and management time,” Mr Raman Roy, Chairman and Managing Director of Quatrro, said.

HCL BPO, which has close to 7,000 employees in Noida, did “load balancing” routing bulk of the traffic to its Chennai location in case of UK clients.

Load balancing

“For some processes, we have routed 80 per cent to Chennai and increased the manning in Chennai. These measures are a part of our business continuity and disaster recovery plans,” its Deputy General Manager (Noida facility), Mr Ashok Pathak, said.

InfoVision Group, which has 1,000 employees on BPO operations in Gurgaon, said it had a deployed a team at Gurgaon border to monitor the flow of company vehicles.

“Since the traffic was disrupted at MG road route, the team sent us an update which enabled us to move the vehicle traffic to alternate routes.

The attendance was normal except for two cabs which could not reach office on time,” Mr Aditya Gupta, President and Founder of InfoVision Group, said.

InterGlobe Technologies, however, pointed out that the employee turnout had dropped by more than 50 per cent on Thursday.

“We asked employees who live around the office to take on additional work. As a result, the client SLAs were not affected,” its Chief Executive Officer Mr Vipul Doshi said.

Earlier during the day Gujjars blocked road and rail traffic in the capital and adjoining areas as part of their ‘NCR rasta roko’ agitation even as over 35,000 policemen fanned out across the National Capital Region to prevent any untoward incident.

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Gujjar agitation: BPOs switch to back-up plans to avert disruption

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