CoronaVirus (COVID 19) – What does it mean for the Tech. industry in India?

COVID19 has taken the world by storm. No one expected that businesses could come to a stand-still this way across the world. At DCKAP, we decided to shut down our offices and asked all our employees to work from home on March 13, 2020. However, when we made the call, we anticipated that things should settle in a week or so. Within a few days, we understood the magnitude of COVID19. In hindsight, we acted early (we could have also done this one more week in advance). How will COVID 19 impact the tech. Industry in India?

India has been dependent on the software services industries since the ‘90s and 2000s. When we talk about tech.we took inspiration from Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, HCL, and more. However, since 2010, things have changed. More Product companies started blossoming from India, and we are able to create products from India and sell to the world. One of the things we have lacked for a long time in India is the infrastructure (we still do). We used to have frequent disconnects in the Internet connections (this also happened at the offices), and there was no reliability in the internet connections. This has significantly improved in the last few years.

Remote Work: Though some people had the luxury and tools  to work from home, a majority of the tech. workforces had to come to office.  Even those folks who worked from home were camera shy and they did not want to turn on their webcams. At times, when people work from home, they have unstable connections, no camera, and even for companies, it looked like it was very hard to monitor productivity. However, this is dependent on the person working from home. In some of the cases, we have seen higher productivity when people work from home. 95% or more people were always working from the offices, and they had to travel to work. 

COVID 19: COVID19 has changed the whole game. We do not have a choice, but we need to equip ourselves well to work from home. We have had multiple remote meetings and it is amazing to see people logging in from different locations. A lot of the folks have moved away from Chennai (where we are located) to their hometowns. In one of the calls, we had people join in from Trichy, Hubli, Salem, Karaikudi, and Chennai. Thanks to some of the private internet operators, they have enabled the internet connectivity to Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

POST-COVID 19: COVID19 is bound to have an impact on the economy. In the short to long term, it will be impacting the tech. industry . However as things progress, it will make the Technology Workforce in India much stronger. This will bring the world closer to each other, and communication will be more seamless. More Work From Home tools  will be available, and we will have better internet connectivity and technology will spread to more tier 2 and tier 3 cities, This will also motivate a lot more people from the villages to take up tech. jobs and work from home. However all that matters in the tech. industry is learning. With universities like Harvard and Stanford going online and even children in India getting used to online learning with private instructors, this will democratize education and learning. This is already happening, however will accelerate post COVID 19. Once things settle down, India will be well equipped to create more jobs and empower more people.

Comprehensive resource for Indian Businesses: Invest India, National Investment Promotion & Facilitation Agency has designed a Business Immunity Platform to provide dynamic resources on India’s active response to Covid-19.This website also has a section on how top Indian companies have responded to the crisis.