War Rooms, Oxygen: IT Companies Scramble To Handle COVID-19 Surge

Banks including Goldman Sachs and Standard Chartered have put in place infrastructure to vaccinate thousands of employees and their families when age restrictions are lifted on May 1.

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 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 offices.