With the Covid-19 situation easing and normalcy returning, the IT and hospitality industries have appealed to the IT professionals to come back to offices.
As over 85 per cent of the about six lakh employees working in different IT and IT-enabled companies are still working from home, hundreds of hostels and paying-guest accommodations in the IT hub areas of Madhapur and Gachibowli are reeling under severe financial stress.
Maheedhar Vellampalli, Treasurer of IT Corridor Hostel Association, has said the pandemic had forced at least 20 per cent of the 2,000 hostels in the IT hub area to shutdown operations.
The association has a total membership of 3,500 hostels in different parts of the city.
Addressing a press conference here on Thursday, he said another 30 per cent of the hostels were facing severe financial crisis as the occupancy levels continue to be under 20 per cent in most hostels.
“The remaining 50 per cent of the hostels are able to survive thanks to the cooperation from property owners that allowed them to rework rentals,” he said.
Dependent on hostels
Stating that about one lakh people were dependent directly or indirectly on hostels, he said their survival would depend on the return of IT employees to their offices.
He said that all the hostels were equipped with facilities to help employees meet the demands of a hybrid mode of working, where the employees were supposed to go to offices twice or thrice a week.
Bharani K Aroll, President of the Hyderabad Software Enterprises Association (HYSEA), said that about 10-15 per cent of the employees were working from offices. “We expect that this would go up to 60 per cent by June-July this year,” he said.
Appealing to the IT employees to return to offices, he said that scores of businesses that were dependent on the IT industry were adversely impacted.
Published on
April 07, 2022
