The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : IT firm leaves staff in the lurch

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jun 04, 2011
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

IT firm leaves staff in the lurch

Deepa Kurup

Freshers paid over Rs. 1.5 lakh each to fly-by-night operation

SAD DAY:Employees mill about anxiously before the closed doors of Electrosys Solutions India Pvt. Ltd. in Jeevanbimanagar on Friday.

BANGALORE: When Dheeraj disembarked his bus on Friday morning to find a large restive group of colleagues outside his office, his worst fears were confirmed. He and over 100 other software engineering professionals at Electrosys Solutions India Pvt. Ltd. discovered that morning that their office premises in Jeevanbimanagar was locked and the proprietors had fled.

Ominous portents

For some time now, there were dark forebodings. None of the employees of the firm, set up three months back, had been paid for the past two months, but they had stayed on, holding on to their hard-won job. Mr. Dheeraj, a fresher in the industry from a Coimbatore engineering college, is among a group of 30 who secured this job through a freelance consultant. At the time of recruitment, each of the 100-odd employees — most recruited through these consultants — had coughed up Rs. 1.2 lakh to Rs. 1.8 lakh. “We were told it is a recruitment-cum-training fee. We did not think twice about paying up because this is common practice in the industry,” Mr. Dheeraj said.

Going by photographs of documents the employees produced, it appears that the firm was registered as ‘trading services'. Initially, the proprietors had claimed it was a subsidiary of the Italian firm Electrosys, and that it had another “bigger and older” branch in ITPB.

A month ago, some of them discovered that these claims were false. When confronted, the management team — comprising Chinmaya, Karthik and Saurabh — assured them that two projects, one from the Orissa Government and the other from Wipro Technologies, were practically in their pocket. For the first three weeks, the freshers had undergone training on basic IT skills such as .Net. Since then, they had been working on practice projects. Incidentally, the trainers are yet to see a paisa for their efforts. A tea seller, who was hanging around, told this reporter that the management owed him Rs. 7,000!

Despondency

Panic and anger soon turned into despondency as the young employees waited outside the Jeevanbimanagar Police Station, where a case of fraud has been booked.

This case is indicative of the deep crisis that thousands of engineering graduates face every year. Almost all those who had gathered here are fresh graduates from Tier-II colleges in semi-urban areas. A majority of them are from outside Karnataka, largely Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Their testimonies are similar.

After months of job hunting, most had no option but to turn to consultants who promised them jobs in exchange for around Rs. 1.5 lakh, generally termed as a ‘training and job' fee.

Loans to pay

While Mr. Dheeraj took a loan from a private company, his friend Manikandan said that his father had mortgaged some land back in Salem to raise the cash. “I thought I will start paying the instalments in April, but the salary never came,” he sighed.

Another young techie, an electronics engineering graduate from Salem, says that he had attended over 50 interviews before he got this job. He feels that most successful job interviews are “fixed” through agents. Sadly, for these young people looking for that crucial break, it was a double heartbreak.

* Employees' names have been changed.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Karnataka