Panic grips Satyam employees

Hyderabad: The pink slips haven't arrived yet, but the uncertainty is killing for the 53,000 employees of Satyam, particularly at a time when the IT industry is going slow on recruitment.Ranked among the top three employers in India last year, Satyam's placement tests were a rage among techies, who compared notes through the internet to make it to the company.Satyam was ranked the second best employer in 2007 by Hewitt Associates in a study partnered by Wall Street Journal Asia."By God's grace I'm a Satyamite..." read a message posted by a Jaipur tech student who got through Satyam in February 2008, when the company was already fudging accounts.
"We are now worried about our jobs," said Raghu K, another Satyamite, dismayed by today's revelations of accounts fraud by the company's iconic founder Ramalinga Raju. The possibility of a takeover too looks distant, further compounding the worries of employees."Initially, our reports suggests that the employees of the IT firm were quite scared about their fate. We were trying to reach the employees but could not get through their board number," Karthik Shekhar, General Secretary of BPO-IT Union UNITES Professionals India, told PTI.UNITES Professional India, which has 1800 members, said that its website has got 7,000 hits from Hyderabad since last night."Its not only the employees, their peers and relatives are also coming to our Hyderabad office after the announcement to make out what we can do for them," he added.Panic-stricken employees were seen in small groups outside the corporate office, discussing the issue. However, they remained tight-lipped before the media. "We hope whoever takes over the company will put things right," Satyamite Raghu said.Most of the employees are also worried about their financial commitments like repayment of loans.C R Aravinda, a junior employee, said, "The only thing we can do is to work hard. We are serving clients as usual." A senior official of software industry body NASSCOM on condition of anonymity said: "If the need be, we may request other member companies to accommodate them." However, Satyam's interim CEO Ram Mynampati, in a statement to employees, apologised "for the uncertainty and inconvenience that this incident has caused to you and your families." "We will now be a better company and we shall soon be a successful case study of how organisations have turned over a new leaf," he said.He said the company would also meet the employees onsite and in these sessions, the company would explain to them what happened, and articulate the actions that are being taken to retain your confidence in the company."A series of extremely unfortunate events led to this. A SWAT team, consisting of senior leaders, has been formed. Many of them are Satyam veterans with a minimum of 10 years experience and more than 20 years in the industry," he said.This team will support him to steer Satyam through this challenging phase. The team represents all customer facing units, key horizontal competency units and critical support units, he said.