Transformer by Mint | India’s tech future: From Orwellian workplace monitoring to trial rooms at home

Indian heritage IT company Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. has begun familiarizing executives with tools like ProHance that monitor productivity through mouse and keyboard activity. Simply put, certain employees of the Nasdaq-listed company would have to move their mouse every five minutes and type something on their keyboards every 15 minutes.

Failure to do so could result in those employees being signed out, lower billing, and possibly a reprimand from the manager. The system will also be equipped to measure hours spent on “productive" tools, URLs, and an employee’s actual production hours against the project’s expected production hours.

However, Cognizant is not the first. According to experts, customer support companies and peers, including Wipro and Firstsource Solutions, have also been using such tools.

Meanwhile, the Indian government has formally initiated the long-awaited data-privacy regime with the notification of the provisions of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023—more than two years after it was passed by Parliament.

Personal data protection

The electronics and IT ministry on Friday established a four-member data protection board, bringing the personal data protection law into effect.

As part of this, writes Shouvik Das, my colleague in New Delhi, companies have up to 18 months to appoint consent managers and data protection officers who must be part of a larger effort to seek user permission for using their personal information for targeted ads.

If you have a little one at home, this law comes as a welcome move because platforms will now have to seek parental approval for using the data of children under 18 years of age. The law will also allow social-media platforms to live-track the location of underage users for safety purposes.

A government official, on condition of anonymity, assuaged concerns over government control of data, adding that there was no “strong enough" case against the government’s usage of personal data during the consultation phases.

Telcos request lower prices, longer spectrum periods

Now, three of India's largest telecom operators, which are also major internet service providers, have requested that the telecom regulatory body lower the spectrum base price and extend its usage period to four decades.

This request, writes Jatin Grover, comes in the backdrop of high base prices leaving radio waves that enable wireless communication unsold. The companies said cheaper radio waves are essential for building network capacity, in line with the Digital India mission.

Extending spectrum usage would provide clearer visibility to telecom companies in terms of business, allowing them to invest in long-term network technologies, while ensuring stable policymaking.

Indian mid-tier IT firms to hire more than larger peers

“Back in the IT sector, signs of caution are emerging for engineering students aspiring to join the workforce.

The country’s mid-sized IT outsourcers are expected to continue a three-year trend—not only are they expected to end the fiscal year with more incremental headcount, but also hire more employees than their larger peers.

Mid-tier IT firms, earning between $1 billion and $5 billion in annual revenue, have also been growing faster than their larger peers over the last year or so, which lends credence to the higher headcount additions.

While experts attribute this trend to faster growth and pressing personnel needs for short-term projects, historical patterns point in the same direction. In each of the last two fiscal years, the cohort with higher headcount at the end of the April-September period ended up with the largest overall headcount by year-end.

Trial rooms at home

Here is a reminder that Christmas and New Year’s Eve are around the corner. This calls for new outfits. And don’t worry, crowded stores may not be a hassle for long. How? Sakshi Sadashiv reveals that there are online brands that are offering try-at-home options.

The “living-room trial" option offers customers the convenience of ordering their favourite apparel from home, trying it on, and returning the unwanted pieces. Concerns surrounding drivers who have to wait while patrons try on the clothes are addressed by apps imposing a fixed rate for such options, regardless of the clothes ordered.

Mumbai-based Zilo is one such startup that gets half its orders from try-and-buy options. Slikk, another such startup offering at-home trial options, said its average order values are higher for trial-at-home deliveries. Allowing shoppers to try clothes at home enhances the convenience for customers, who can now order almost anything online, from everyday groceries to high-end electronic gadgets.

In other news

Billionbrains Garage Ventures Ltd, the parent company of the online investment platform Groww, became the most valued listed broking firm, as reported by Ram Sahgal and Sneha Shah. This happened after its debut on the stock exchanges on Wednesday, when shares rose 31% to end at ₹131.33 a piece on National Stock Exchange.

Groww, one of the country’s largest online investment platforms, is less than a decade old and already one of the most profitable new-age companies to get listed.

Google is making big bets in the country’s AI space, reported Soumya Gupta. Preeti Lobana, Google India’s country manager, said the tech giant is exploring the sale of its Gemma AI model to governments and local businesses, offering computing capacity and free access to its cloud services. This comes as the company announced a $15 billion investment to set up a data centre and subsea gateway in Andhra Pradesh's coastal city Vishakhapatnam.

Transformer by Mint is a weekly newsletter that brings India’s most important and interesting technology updates under one umbrella. As the world transforms with every day of innovation, Transformer will keep a tab on the impact that technologies will make in each of our lives. Published every week, the newsletter brings some of India’s tech landscape’s most insightful coverages until date.