Covid-19 lockdown: Cognizant offers extra 25% of base pay to India employees

BENGALURU: Staff at Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp's India and the Philippines centre, up to associate level, will get extra salary in April, chief executive Brian Humphries said in a note to employees.

The US-headquartered company said the extra money, at 25% of base pay, is in recognition of the hardship the employees and their families face as they work from home in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This will apply to more than two-thirds of the India workforce. “This will be processed with your April paycheck, and we will be reviewing this approach monthly,” Humphries said.

Cognizant has over 2 lakh employees in India, next only to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)which has a global headcount of more than 4 lakh, majority of which are based in India.

“We all recognize that Covid-19 is one of the biggest shocks to the world in decades. Cognizant, like all global companies, is experiencing the effects of this public health emergency on both the demand and fulfillment sides of our business, from London to Mumbai to Manilla and New York,” Humphries said.

Cognizant has enabled work from home for the majority of its offshore teams.

Work-from-home measures include provisioning new laptops and encrypting desktops and moving them to associate homes, enabling the use of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), providing additional bandwidth connectivity and air cards with appropriate client permissions and security protocols.

“Our global company has a long history of operating virtually and remotely, and rallying and responding around the clock, wherever needed. As you’ve seen, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has imposed a nationwide 21-day lockdown in an attempt to contain the spread of the coronavirus. The Philippines is under a state of national emergency. We support these and other efforts by governments across the world to ‘flatten the curve’ and contain the spread of Covid-19,” Humphries added.

Total number of novel coronavirus infected cases in India climbed to 724 as of Friday, with death toll at 17.

World over, more than a half a million have contracted the infection, with death toll at 23,293. In the US, more than 83,000 people have tested positive for Covid-19, higher than China, Italy or any other country so far.

The Indian government on Thursday rolled out a ₹1.7 trillion relief package, amounting to about 1% of its gross domestic product, marking an aggressive attempt to limit the economic damage caused by the coronavirus outbreak and tackle the loss of livelihood of millions of poor hit by an unprecedented 21-day nationwide lockdown.