As part ofcost-cutting to tackle the current downturn, the country’s largest softwareexporter, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), has imposed “travel restrictions andput a productivity bar on its employees,” says Kesav V Nori, executive vice-presidentand executive director (TCS innovation lab — business systems).

“A lot of interchange has been made inour existing infrastructure. We have now increased the number of videoconferences between people in India and web casts internally, to reduce theusage of wired lines, besides putting restrictions on travel,” Nori toldBusiness Standard on the sidelines of a function to launch the company’s newcomputer-based functional literacy software in Urdu.

There was also a productivity bar to be met at various levels, he said.“Besides, there is a greater move of people from onsite to offshore,” he said,declining to give any numbers.

Nori, under whose supervision the Urdu software was developed, said software inArabic, and Spanish and other European languages, were also being developed byTCS. “While the Arabic software will be ready in a month’s time, the Spanishsoftware will take about three months. The idea is to provide a medium throughlocal dialects for handling migration problems,” said Nori, who is retiringfrom TCS on March 31.

TCS joined the belt-tightening club of Wipro and Infosys last month, when itannounced plans to review the variable component of its employees’ salariesevery quarter. Variable pay accounts for 20-35 per cent of TCS employees’ grosssalary. The company had cut the variable pay by around 1.5 per cent in February2008.

Infosys has already started recalling about 25 per cent of its US-based salesteams since last year, while Wipro has announced that it has employed 30 cost-cuttingmeasures, especially in operational efficiency, since the third quarter of thisfinancial year.