Did border dispute cause 2 Infosys deaths?
By Suneetha.B

The Indian tech community is in mourning this week. Five young Infoscions met with a tragic death when the bus they were traveling in overturned at Avandhi Ghat near Nipani town. 43 freshers were traveling from the Infosys Mysore Training hub to their first job at the Pune facility. Techies are angry that a border dispute between States prevented medical help on time.

The dead have been identified as Ankita Vedprakash Arya of Delhi, Agnivesh Atidardhi from Bihar and Kush Mishra, Tushar Agrawal and Rachit Mehrotra from Uttar Pradesh. Respected Infosys, which has a good track record of employer-employee relations, has rushed support teams to the site as well as opened help lines at Mysore, Pune and Bangalore campuses. The press release at the company website also said that they observed two minutes silence at 4.30 p.m. IST yesterday as a mark of respect to their colleagues who are now no more.

The bus, a Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation bus, is reported to have been over speeding, say the local police who arrived at the spot within a few minutes of the accident. Press reports also say that there are skid marks that extend to 100m and deeply etched into the National Highway 4 surface. Three of the techies died on the spot and the other two at the hospital in Belgaum to which they were taken. Eight people are still undergoing treatment at the hospitals.

The Govt of Karnataka is giving Rs. 2.5 Lakhs each to the five families who have lost their family members; the Government will also pay the medical bills of everyone hurt in the accident. It is not clear what the software giant intends to pay the family of the deceased. All the employees are insured, so the insurance company should pay as per the policy.  Infosys has the largest ever group life insurance policy in India worth 24, 000 crores with the LIC. The cover is said to be somewhere between 20 and 80 Lakh per employee as reported in the press in November 2008. Techgoss has been in touch with Infosys on this matter, and the Infosys spokesperson has promised to get back to us with details as soon as she can get confirmed information.  Infosys is one Indian tech company that is well known for taking good care of their employees.

Were border disputes and recession induced cost cutting contributory factors to the Infosys losses?

The DNA reports that a life or two might have been saved in the tragic accident involving Infoscions, if not for the border dispute between the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka. It is said that an ambulance at Nipani, the accident site, in Karnataka will not generally be allowed to enter Kolhapur town due to this bureaucratic and territorial issue.

The report in DNA says that the officials were insensitive to the gravity of the condition of the injured and delayed taking the injured to the hospital by an hour by taking them to Belgaum which was in Karnataka state and 75 km away from the accident spot. If they had been taken to Kolhapur in Maharashtra, which was only 45 Kms away, perhaps there might have been lesser number of lives lost.  Kolhapur is reachable in about 45 minutes from the accident spot and has good medical facilities too.

It was not just the loss of time in transporting the victims but also delay in deciding where to take the injured that sealed their fate. There is also a report of heated word wars between the injured and the police officials on this issue. It is tragic that human walls stand in the way of a young life on the threshold of a bright career.

On a different note, when Techgoss spoke to Karthik Shekhar, General Secretary, UNITES Professionals, India, he emphasized the need for more safety measures and sensible decisions when employees were being transported to destinations on official business. Karthik felt that it is unbelievable that a company like Infosys which has such a huge cash reserve actually used a bus to transport 43 employees together on a single vehicle, and that too on a grueling 14 hour journey on road.

Infosys is a global consulting company which advises the world on how to optimize resources but take care of risks.  So how come they were using a single bus to transport a huge number of their best investments in one go? Why were they transported by road for such a big distance, and why together?  Why wasn’t it done on different days in smaller groups? Karthik was apprehensive that this was a cost cutting measure, and if so did Nilekani and other top bosses travel this way too? This is a company which claims that all employees have equal value.

UNITES have offered their condolences to the family members of the deceased 

Karthik’s question is something which the world will echo in the coming days, not just with Infosys but all the software companies in India.