Four days into Japan's biggest crisis since World War II, India's top tech firms have started bringing back employees and moving work to their centres outside Japan. On Friday last week, the country was h IT by an earthquake measuring 8.9 on the Richter Scale that unleashed a tsunami that swept parts of Japan.The situation has been aggravated by the three nuclear reactor explosions the country has witnessed since then.
While accounting for a meagre 1% of India's total software exports worth $60 billion, Japan has been one of the most lucrative markets for outsourcing firms with top customers such as Toshiba , Sony and Nisaan opening up offshoring to cut costs and cope with scarcity of locally-trained IT staff.
Several Indian IT players have centres in Japan with the larger ones like Infosys and Wipro employing over 400 people in the country. Infosys said it was bringing back most of its employees to India and that even the Japanese nationals among them had been given an option of shifting to India for a while and working from here. Infosys has been talking to the Indian government for this. The company will continue to support clients locally and from offshore locations till the situation stabilises.
