KOCHI: The Information Technology major Infosys will honor all the 18,000 job offers it made on campuses across India for 2009-10 despite global slowdown, according to CEO and Managing Director Kris Gopalakrishnan.
“The 18,000 recruits will join the company from July,” he told reporters after delivering a lecture at the Rajagiri School of Engineering and Technology here. “We have also recruited from across 25 colleges in Kerala”.
Usually the new recruits at Infosys are trained for 16 weeks but this time the period will be extended by six to eight weeks to be trained on another technological stream.
“There is no growth now. So rather than keeping them idle, we thought we would let them learn something more,” he said. “We are going slow on recruitment now. Only in case of absolute necessity would anyone be recruited. The recruitment drive is expected to return to normal sometime in 2010 when the recovery of the economy starts”.
He said the growth rate of IT industry was expected to drop by 10 to 15 percent in 2008-09 as against the 30 percent growth that it registered in the previous year.
The first phase of the Infosys campus coming up in Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram, at an estimated cost of one billion rupees would be completed by May. “We will continue to expand here. Presently, Infosys’ development center employs about 1,400 people at Technopark,” he said.
The economic downturn provides a great opportunity for India to lead the way in developing clean technologies to check climate change, said Gopalakrishnan. The crisis offers India the opportunity to create products and services that better suit the environment. He said India was still growing at seven percent while many of the economies were registering negative growth.
