Reverting to work from home not solution to address sexual harassment incidents: TCS chairman

Mumbai: IT services major TCS on Friday said reverting to remote work is not the solution to deal with the incidents of sexual harassment and education is the best tool to tackle such issues at work. TCS chairman N Chandrasekaran made these remarks while replying to shareholder queries on this aspect. In FY24, the number of sexual harassment cases filed by staffers in FY24 stood at 110 against 49 in the year-ago period.

Chandrasekaran said that education is the best solution to reduce such incidents and stressed that the number of incidents is not so high when compared with the company's 6-lakh strong employee base. "I don't think we can go to remote working to solve this problem," Chandrasekaran, who also chairs the Tata Group, said.

He said that the company wants to increase the composition of women employees to much higher than the current 36 per cent and is laying a special focus on increasing their share in the senior management as well. Making it clear that the company is not in the business of creating jobs for people, he said the focus is to create careers for candidates and build a strong institution in the process. Apart from the 6 lakh employees, the company has 30,312 contract workers as well, he said, adding that the overall attrition of employees has come down.

Chandrasekaran said the capital expenditure of the company stood at Rs 2,650 crore in FY24, and is likely to go up in the coming years as spends on critical aspects normalize after the effects of the pandemic reduce. The spends in FY24 included Rs 1,100 crore on technologies and Rs 1,550 crore on physical infrastructure which seems to have been incurred as the company got a larger number of people back to working from offices. Chandrasekaran added that it spent an additional Rs 2,750 crore on research and innovation, which can also be deemed as technology spend.

Declining to give any specific business targets, Chandrasekaran said TCS will aim to better on its FY24 performance both in terms of revenue growth and profit margins. "IT spending is not coming down, it is getting staggered as the world is going through uncertain times. Remember, the tech spend for all corporations globally will only increase," he said.

The company is desirous of completing the over Rs 15,000-crore BSNL 4G contract in FY25 itself, Chandrasekaran said, adding that over 10,000 sites have already been operationalised. TCS is not impacted by the geopolitical events, and does not see any headwinds on the visa front as well, he said. Replying to a question on potential tampering of electoral rolls in India, and whether the largest IT player would like to work on getting them right, Chandrasekaran replied in the affirmative, saying the company has always worked on critical projects.