IT, ITES firms’ employees can work from home till May 31: Ravi Shankar Prasad

Employees of information technology (IT) companies and IT-enabled service providers can work from home until May 31, IT and telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Tuesday, extending the timeline by a month in the aftermath of Covid-19, restrictions on transport and safe distancing practices put in place to curb its spread .

The department of telecommunications (DoT) on March 13 relaxed rules to allow employees of IT and ITES firms to work from home without mandatorily going through the authorised PPVPN (Provider Provisioned Virtual Private Network). The relaxed guidelines are applicable until April 30; the guidelines will now stay in force until May-end.

International call centres, business process outsourcing and knowledge process outsourcing centres, e-learning sites, billing centres and medical transcription companies are covered by the relaxed rules.

The mandatory ₹1 crore deposit fee needed to let employees work from home has been waived and the service providers need to only inform the local DoT office of the addresses of their remote workers; ministry officials said this can be made a permanent fixture

Prasad announced the extension after a meeting by video conference with the chief ministers of Haryana and Sikkim,and the deputy CMs of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka, who are also in charge of the IT departments in their states. State IT ministers from Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Gujarat, Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, Assam, Odisha, Goa, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Meghalaya were also in attendance.

After the meeting, Prasad said the states had requested that district-level dashboard access be given to the Aarogya Setu app to all district administrations. Some states asked him to explore the possibility of integrating the system for issuing ePasses during the lockdown with the Aarogya Setu app.

Bihar deputy CM Sushil Modi asked him to develop a digital platform for sharing best practices and innovations put in place by different states to tackle the health crisis; Prasad asked the IT ministry to initiate the development of such a platform.

Telangana’s KT Rama Rao suggested that a strategic working group of government officials and industry leaders be formed to explore digital solutions in education, healthcare, commerce, and emerging technologies.

Prasad said that his office was in touch with all social media platforms to curb the spread of fake news, and that offenders would “face consequence and even police action.”