Indian IT firms ignore the pain

INDIAN IT FIRMS couldn't give a toss about a painful muscular disease that has taken hold in one third of the industry, said a medical expert.

Nasscom, the Indian industry's trade association, did not answer our enquiries this week about the RSI problem that was unearthed in a survey of 30,000 workers in Bangalore. But it did issue a pronouncement on how much money the industry was making: $48 billion in 2007 and predictions of $64 billion in 2008.

"NASSCOM doesn’t care and most IT/BPO companies in India try their best to sabotage any health and safety research studies for fear of adverse publicity - especially in the USA," said Dr. Deepak Sharan, medical director of the RECOUP Neuromusculoskeletal Rehabilitation Centre in Bangalore, and author of the report.

"Most Indian computer users first hear of RSI only after being severely afflicted by it, sometimes several months after losing their jobs because of it, " he said.

"Some Indian companies have dangerous working conditions and it is not unusual to have medical transcriptionists working all night without breaks hunched over on dinner tables and non-adjustable plastic chairs or stools, sometimes using their feet to operate the mouse once their hands are crippled by pain," Sharan added.

Indian employees can't seek compensation for RSI injuries, said Sharan, so companies don't consider ergonomics. When they do, they follow Western practices that where designed for typically taller people. There is a skills shortage in India, but companies are more inclined to pay high salaries than consider how their workstations are designed.

"However," said Sharan, "this apathy is not universal."

He said he provides ergonomics consulting to over 60 IT corporations including Oracle, Hewlett Packard, Texas Instruments, Perot Systems, Cisco, Wipro, Titan Industries, AMD, NDS, Monsanto and Sterling Commerce Solutions, some of which will be recognised as Indian firms and some of which paid a great deal of care and attention to the RSI issue.

Some might think Sharan unpatriotic, with the Indian IT boom being the rags to riches story that it is. At a Nasscom love-in in Mumbai this week to celebrate the industry's voluptuous wealth, former Indian president APJ Abdul Kalam said in dreamy reports that he imagined India's IT industry growing so munificently that it would bring an end global poverty within a generation. There is debate in India, however, about how well the IT boom has distributed its wealth to its own peasantry. µ