TCS, Infosys recall employees from Japan

Mangaloretoday News Network

Bangalore, March 15: Leading IT companies have started pulling back employees from quake ravaged Japan. India’s biggest IT Company Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) today said, "We are ready to relocate our Indian employees and their families back to India as well as move our local Japanese employees and their families to other locations of safety."
 

"The safety of our employees is our top priority. We are in close touch with our team in Japan around the clock. We have set up a communications system to provide all employees in Japan with frequent updates and stay in touch with them," the company’s statement said.

TCS has a facility about 250 kilometers from Tokyo with over 200 employees.

IT major Infosys has over 250 employees in Japan with offices in Tokyo, Fukuoka and Nagoya. Infosys said, "We are taking appropriate action to keep our employees safe. In cases where employees and their families have expressed a desire to return temporarily to safety we are facilitating their travel."

"Employees in Japan are being apprised of the situation on a periodic basis and being monitored for safety. We will continue to advise them of appropriate course of action as the situation develops," the company’s statement said.

Another major IT firm Wipro has approximately 400 employees in two locations in Japan apart from customer locations.

Despite being the world’s third largest IT services market, Indian IT companies have a small presence in Japan.  The Japanese IT services market at $108 billion has only recently started offshoring work to Indian companies. Analysts say IT spending could now get delayed due to the earthquake with major Japanese clients from manufacturing and BFSI.

 

Japan radiation levels rise after third nuclear plant explosion

Tokyo:  Japan’s nuclear crisis verged toward catastrophe on Tuesday after an explosion damaged the vessel containing the nuclear core at one reactor and a fire at another spewed large amounts of radioactive material into the air, according to statements from Japanese government and industry officials.

In a brief address to the nation at 11 am Tokyo time, Prime Minister Naoto Kan pleaded for calm, but warned that radiation had already spread from the crippled reactors and there was "a very high risk" of further leakage. Fortunately, the prevailing winds were sweeping most of the plume of radioactivity out into the Pacific Ocean, rather than over populated areas.

The sudden turn of events, after an explosion Monday at one reactor and then an early-morning explosion Tuesday at yet another -- the third in four days at the plant - already made the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station the worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl reactor disaster a quarter century ago.

It diminished hopes earlier in the day that engineers at the plant, working at tremendous personal risk, might yet succeed in cooling down the most damaged of the reactors, No. 2, by pumping in seawater. According to government statements, most of the 800 workers at the plant had been withdrawn, leaving 50 or so workers in a desperate effort to keep the cores of three stricken reactors cooled with seawater pumped by firefighting equipment, while crews battled to put out the fire at the No. 4 reactor, which they claimed to have done just after noon on Tuesday.