On Wednesday, multinational tech giant IBM, which has over one lakh employees in India, referred to moonlighting as immoral behaviour. Moonlighting, the practice of taking on additional jobs after conventional working hours, has recently received a lot of attention from IT businesses.
IBM's managing director for India and South Asia, Sandip Patel said, “At the time of joining, the company's employees sign an agreement saying they will be working only for IBM. Notwithstanding what people can do in the rest of their time, it is not ethically right to do that (moonlighting).”
Tech industry leaders in India have a range of viewpoints on side jobs or moonlighting, which refers to work that an employee does for extra money. Chairman of Wipro, Rishad Premji referred to such behaviour as cheating.
“You know Rishad's position on this, right? I share Rishad's position,” Patel said. When questioned about the firm's hiring intentions for India, which is important to the company both as a source of talent and as a market, Patel said the pandemic's effect on employees returning to their hometowns hasn't totally reversed, thus the IT sector has adopted the hybrid style of working.
According to Patel, the corporation intends to strengthen its presence in the nation and refers to tier-2 and tier-3 cities as rising clusters. IBM India has opened a delivery centre in Mysuru and also maintains operations in Kolkata and the National Capital Region.
Meanwhile, the company announced that it has signed up with Airtel to offer its secured edge cloud services to the telco. The Airtel platform backed by IBM cloud satellite will power Maruti Suzuki's initiatives to streamline play productivity and quality operations, a statement by IBM said.
Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar also spoke at the event. He told the audience that the country has made progress since the launch of the Digital India initiative and has reimagined its ambitions in the post-COVID world.
(With PTI inputs)
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