Indian IT firms reinstate benched employees

Mumbai: As a positive sign for the doomed Indian IT sector, Mumbai based IT outsourcing firms Mastek and Hexaware have recalled their employees from the virtual bench. The virtual bench was created for its non-billable staff, who had no projects to work on and had to take a 50 percent pay cut in their basic pay.

"Though 350 was the upper limit, the company never inducted over 220 staffers in the virtual bench and nearly 50 have been deployed in live projects," Deependra Chumble, Chief People Officer, Hexaware Technologies told Business Line. Mastek too had brought around 425 employees or 10 percent of its total workforce to the virtual bench for up to 12 months. The company offered an alternative to the benched employees whereby they can quit the job with some compensation package, which was opted by around 60 benched employees of the company.

"Instead of moving from a virtual to actual bench, these employees have moved from virtual bench to live projects. Around 40 benched employees have been recalled to the billable pool," Kalpana Jaishankar, Head of HR at Mastek said. The company still has about 330 un-billable employees within the system. The companies however, consider it to be too early to assume these steps to be a sign of the reviving economy or the IT sector.