Infosys sacks techies for ‘unethical behaviour’

MYSORE - Infosys Technologies has sacked a software engineer, Abhishek Gupta, for making a hoax call to budget carrier GoAir at Delhi airport Oct 25 to avoid missing his Bangalore-bound flight, a company official said here Tuesday.

Yes, we have sacked Gupta for indulging in unethical behaviour. We have a very strict code of conduct. We take strict action against those who do not adhere to it, Infosys board member and head of HRD and education and research T.V. Mohandas Pai told IANS.

The 25-year-old Gupta caused a bomb scare by telling GoAir staff that there was some suspicious object on the plane after he failed to convince them earlier to delay the flight.

He thought the hoax call will delay the flight and he could reach the airport in the meantime to catch the flight, a Delhi police official said after Gupta was taken into custody and jailed.

The IT bellwether has also suspended another software engineer, Pallav Chakraborty, after he was arrested with his wife Sinchita by the Bangalore police Dec 29 for allegedly torturing their 15-year-old domestic maid.

Though Chakraborty joined the company 15 days before his arrest, we suspended him after an inquiry into the child abuse, which is a very sad thing to have happened, Pai said.

As the police were investigating the case and the accused was in the judicial custody, Pai said the company would take strict action against him after the law had taken its course.

We do not condone such acts. We are saddened by such an inhuman act. We have 109,882 employees on rolls. I think as we grow bigger, we are not the sample but part of the universe, Pai said on the margins of a media briefing on the company’s financial performance for the third quarter.

Pallav and Sinchita, who hail from Kolkata, brought the girl from West Bengal for household chores.

A social organisation rescued the girl after raiding the house following a tip that a young domestic maid was in a bad state with injuries on her back and cut marks on her lips.

The police did not name the victim to protect her privacy and not to hamper investigation.

The company was also forced to suspend another engineer, Krishnamurthy, working at its Mysore development centre, after the police arrested him Dec 3 on the charge of molesting a French woman.

Krishnamurthy remains suspended as police inquiry is still on. We will not spare anyone if (his or her) behaviour is not in line with our code of conduct, Pai said.

The three incidents occurred at a time when the company was recovering from the impact of a year-long global tech meltdown.