Last checked at 
(Adds response from Wells Fargo)
By Sethuraman N R and Anirban Sen
BENGALURU, April 28 (Reuters) - India's giant IT firms in
Bengaluru and other cities have set up COVID-19 "war-rooms" as
they scramble to source oxygen, medicine and hospital beds for
infected workers and maintain backroom operations for the
world's biggest financial firms.
Banks including Goldman Sachs and Standard Chartered
, who run much of their global back office operations
from large office parks in Bengaluru, Chennai or Hyderabad, have
put in place infrastructure to vaccinate thousands of employees
and their families when age restrictions are lifted on May 1.
Workers at huge technology service providers Accenture
, Infosys and Wipro say teams are
working 13-14 hours daily, under growing pressure and struggling
to deliver on projects as staff call in sick and take time off
to care for friends and relatives.
They play down any threat of a collapse in operations - but
at stake if the surge continues is the infrastructure put in
place by the world's biggest financial companies in cost-cutting
drives that have left them deeply reliant on the big Indian
offices.
"Employees have contracted COVID-19 since the second wave
began, causing severe pressure for projects that are nearing
deadlines," said one employee at Accenture, asking not to be
identified because he was not authorised to speak to the media.
Five other sources at Accenture confirmed the growing issues
with pressure of work. Accenture said it was providing some
medical care and covering the cost of vaccinations for its
employees but did not comment on the impact on productivity.
Wipro said it has not seen any disruption to operations and
has transferred some client projects to offices outside India.
Only about 3% of its nearly 200,000 employees are now
working from the office on critical projects, and it expects
more of those employees to work from home, it said. For those
who have to work from the office, Wipro said it had made living
arrangements at guest houses and hotels nearby.
Infosys, India's second largest software services firm, said
it was operating remotely across all offices and had not seen
any impact on client projects, despite the deteriorating health
situation in the country in recent weeks.
Tata Consultancy Services, India's top information
technology (IT) services firm, similarly said its operations had
not been affected.
India's second wave of infections has seen at least 300,000
people test positive each day for the past week, overwhelming
healthcare facilities and crematoriums and driving an
increasingly urgent international response.
Asia's IT capital Bengaluru, desperate to calm a daily
infection rate five times higher than in last year's first wave,
on Monday ordered a full lockdown that allows ordinary residents
to leave their homes only briefly between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m.
Local IT managers say they struggled to get global chiefs
outside India to recognise the seriousness of the outbreak.
COVID-19 'WAR ROOMS'
India's gigantic IT and call centre service industry employs
more than 4.5 million people directly and relies on huge numbers
of graduates under the age of 30.
They are paid a fraction of Western salaries and had largely
ridden out the COVID-19 pandemic working from home until the
relaxing of restrictions in recent months spurred companies to
call more employees back to the office.
Managers at Goldman Sachs' massive complex in Bengaluru, for
example, told staff in early March to prepare to return to
full-scale office working.
Chief Executive Officer David Solomon said then that the
bank owed it to its incoming class of analysts and interns to
have them come to work in offices for at least part of the
summer. The company quickly U-turned, sending all but essential
employees home on March 27 as cases began to rise.
Another large bank, Wells Fargo, said its employees in India
would continue to work remotely till at least early September.
New strains of the virus have since sent India's case
numbers soaring to global records and brought more infections
among younger Indians.
All 15 of the large companies Reuters spoke to this week
said that they now had vaccination schemes in place. Several
outlined COVID-19 "war-rooms" they had launched to support staff
and secure oxygen and other supplies.
Initially, managers outside India had not wanted their
companies' Indian operations to be seen to be jumping the queue
for vaccines, says a senior manager who runs a workforce of more
than 600 staff at a global bank in Bengaluru, asking not to be
identified.
"The India CEO and others here said: we don't care what it
looks like, people are dying."
(Reporting by Sethuraman N.R., Anirban Sen, Noor Zainab
Hussain, Sachin Ravikumar, Chandini Monnappa, Supriya
Rangarajan, Aaron Saldanha, Anand Katakam, Subrat Patnaik and
Chris Thomas in Bengaluru and Elizabeth Dilts in New York;
writing by Patrick Graham; Editing by Michael Perry and Raju
Gopalakrishnan)
