K’taka shutdown logs out India’s techno hub
BENGALURU: A shutdown across Karnataka on Thursday logged out India’s tech hub, with IT majors Infosys, Wipro and other multinational firms suspending their operations for the day.
Infosys campuses at Electronics City on the city outskirts and other locations were closed on Thursday till 6.30pm as result of the shutdown. The IT major’s offices in Mysuru and Mangaluru were also shut.
A Wipro official said in a statement: “On account of the shutdown, as a precautionary measure, Wipro has declared a holiday for employees in Karnataka on Thursday.”
The 12-hour shutdown is being observed across the southern state for Mahadayi river water from the neighbouring state of Goa to meet the drinking needs of the people in the state’s four northwest districts of Belagavi, Bagalkote, Dharwad and Hubballi.
As a sidelight, the shutdown also resulted in delaying screening of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s movie Padmaavat in the state to late evening.
Localities like Whitefield, a suburb in the northeastern part of the city, and Manyata Tech Park in the northern part, housing several global IT giants like Microsoft, IBM and Cognizant, have also suspended their operations for the day.
The southern state capital is home to at least 750 multinational companies and over 2,000 IT firms, with nearly 20 lakh techies working in them.
With a dominant IT industry, the city contributes to about 40% of the total IT exports. Farmers and pro-kannada organisations and regional outfits have given the dawn-to-dusk shutdown call for the Prime Minister’s intervention to resolve the two decades’ old inter-state dispute over the sharing of the river water for drinking and irrigation needs in the four drought-prone districts.