Infosys sacks techies for 'unethical behaviour'

MYSORE: Infosys Technologies has sacked a software engineer, Abhishek Gupta, for making a hoax call to budget carrier GoAir at Delhi airport Oct 25 to avoid missing his Bangalore-bound flight, a company official said here on Tuesday.

"Yes, we have sacked Gupta for indulging in unethical behaviour. We have a very strict code of conduct. We take strict action against those who do not adhere to it," Infosys board member and head of HRD and education and research T.V. Mohandas Pai told media.

The 25-year-old Gupta caused a bomb scare by telling GoAir staff that there was some suspicious object on the plane after he failed to convince them earlier to delay the flight.

"He thought the hoax call will delay the flight and he could reach the airport in the meantime to catch the flight," a Delhi police official said after Gupta was taken into custody and jailed.

The IT bellwether has also suspended another software engineer, Pallav Chakraborty, after he was arrested with his wife Sinchita by the Bangalore police Dec 29 for allegedly torturing their 15-year-old domestic maid.

"Though Chakraborty joined the company 15 days before his arrest, we suspended him after an inquiry into the child abuse, which is a very sad thing to have happened," Pai said.

As the police were investigating the case and the accused was in the judicial custody, Pai said the company would take strict action against him after the law had taken its course.

"We do not condone such acts. We are saddened by such an inhuman act. We have 109,882 employees on rolls. I think as we grow bigger, we are not the sample but part of the universe," Pai said on the margins of a media briefing on the company's financial performance for the third quarter.

Pallav and Sinchita, who hail from Kolkata, brought the girl from West Bengal for household chores.

A social organisation rescued the girl after raiding the house following a tip that a young domestic maid was in a bad state with injuries on her back and cut marks on her lips.

The police did not name the victim to protect her privacy and not to hamper investigation.

The company was also forced to suspend another engineer, Krishnamurthy, working at its Mysore development centre, after the police arrested him Dec 3 on the charge of molesting a French woman.

"Krishnamurthy remains suspended as police inquiry is still on. We will not spare anyone if (his or her) behaviour is not in line with our code of conduct," Pai said.

The three incidents occurred at a time when the company was recovering from the impact of a year-long global tech meltdown.

Wipro to hire sacked staffers

BANGALORE: If you are a pink slip recipient from Wipro, here’s a piece of good news. Wipro plans to rehire some of the employees it fired a year ago. "Non-performance was the reason for these separations. However, we are open to rehire some of these people who were fired by us a year ago, if they come back to us with additional skill sets. A one-year window would have been enough for them to acquire some additional skills," said Joseph John, vice-president (HR) in Wipro Infotech, the business that looks at the India and Middle-East markets.

The tech major's involuntary attrition rate has gone up by 2 percentage points in the last 16 months. Wipro Infotech said it would also resume campus hiring from January. "We are looking at hiring over 1,000 laterals during the fiscal and 1,000 freshers from campuses in January," said John.

The division, which recruited 1,000 people in the first six months of the fiscal, expects hiring numbers in the second half of the year to be more than double of that.

The additional people requirement comes with Wipro winning a slew of large projects in India and the Middle-East, and also to cater to the growing requirements of existing accounts. The company hired 200 people in Saudi Arabia and Egypt recently.


Wipro is also hiring for its Global Service Management Centre in Mysore with almost 5% jobs earmarked for differently-abled people.

Wipro Infotech is planning to raise the ratio of its women employees from 13% now to 20% in the next two years.
On salary hikes, John said the company had not budgeted a hike at the start of the fiscal. "But we have decided to raise salaries in the fourth quarter across the board."

Monish, Bangalore, says: What an Idea sirjee!!!! Do wipro really have an HR and Startergy Team.. or all has been pink slipped for non-performance.... umm....I pity wipro and its future. Beware dear Wipro Mgmt its time you realize for your mistakes and pay for them dearly.
[10 Nov, 2009 1644hrs IST]

karthik, chennai, says: why would any one who has been laid of at a time of crisis risk joining the same company again?.I bet there will be 0 takers.
[10 Nov, 2009 1631hrs IST]

Amit, Bangalore, says: what a non-sense! One yr back they fired them on performance basis and now they are hiring back. What improvement one can do who is sitting at home for 1 year? They just want to hire the same resources at much lower cost. All this propaganda of firing and rehiring is to save cost nothing else. Actually Wipro is the worst company with no ethics among all indian IT companies.....