IT-BPO industry braves power outage; says it's biz as usual

Indian IT-BPO players like Wipro, Genpact and WNS have kicked in business continuity plans to ensure that services to global clients run as usual even as failure of three grids today left more than 20 states and the National Capital powerless.

The IT-BPO industry, which accounts for over 7 percent of the GDP, are running their operations at their centres in north and eastern India using back-up generator sets that run

on diesel.

“There is no impact at any of the Genpact sites due to the power failure. We have a back-up plan in place and have a four-day supply of diesel,” said Genpact Senior Vice-President (Infrastructure and Logistics) Vidya Srinivasan.

Wipro Technologies Global Head (Operations) Hariprasad Hegde agreed. “Operations at Wipro’s facilities across India continued as normal. Wipro’s facilities have a strong back up

infrastructure and contingency plans to deal with such eventualities,” Hegde said.

KPO player Evalueserve also said it was business as usual at its premises. The company has 1,800 employees at its Gurgaon centre.

“Facilities chosen by companies such as ours need to have 100 percent power back-up that lasts for a couple of days on captive power produced by generators. As such, there was no

downtime in our offices in India due to the power outage,” Evalueserve Country Head (India) Sanjoy Roy Choudhury said.

While the northern grid failed for the second straight day, the eastern and north-eastern grids too collapsed. These three grids carry about 50,000 MW of electricity. IT-BPO companies have facilities spread across Gurgaon, Noida and other smaller cities.

“The critical and non-critical resources were put on optimum utilisation to control the wastage,” said WNS Group CEO Keshav R Murugesh adding that the Gurgaon delivery centre

has not suffered any business loss even as the power outage has happened for the second day in a row.

The collapse has left more than half of the country powerless. Essential services and public transport systems, including Railways and the Delhi Metro were also hit. The companies, however, are facing problems on account of traffic delays and metro services being disrupted.

“Some employees may face problems commuting. However, we do have a back-up plan in place and don’t anticipate much delay,” Srinivasan said.

The BPO sector accounts for a major portion of the $ 100 billion IT-BPO industry in the country. While BPO exports are expected to reach $16 billion in FY2012, domestic

revenue (excluding hardware) from the segment is forecast to reach Rs 91,800 crore.

PTI