Power cut has no effect on India's BPO industry

Indian IT business process outsourcing (BPO) players, like Wipro, Genpact and WNS, have kicked in business continuity plans to ensure services to global clients run as usual even as failure of three grids this week left more than 20 states and the national capital powerless, The Economic Times reports.

The IT-BPO industry, which accounts for over 7% of the GDP, is running its operations at centres in north and eastern India using backup generator sets that run on diesel.

“There is no impact at any of the Genpact sites due to the power failure. We have a backup plan in place and have a four-day supply of diesel,” Genpact senior VP, Infrastructure and Logistics, Vidya Srinivasan says.

According to ZDNet, WNS Group CEO Keshav R Murugesh told The Times of India: “The building infrastructure has dual backup support of gas and diesel. The critical and non-critical resources were put on optimum utilisation to control the wastage.”

He added that his company, which houses about 5 000 employees at a delivery centre in Gurgaon, in the state of Haryana - one of the areas hit - did not suffer any business loss.

The northern grid, which provides power supply to nine states and Union Territories - Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Chandigarh - collapsed at 2:35am on Sunday night, Times of India notes.

Almost entire Delhi went without power for about eight hours during the massive power cut following a collapse of the grid, severely affecting various services, including Metro operations and train services.