In an email to employees, Sundar Pichai, said, “To give employees the ability to plan ahead, we are extending our global voluntary work from home option through 30 June, 2021 for roles that don’t need to be in the office.”

The move is likely to affect most of the 200,000 full-time and contract employees across Google and parent Alphabet Inc, including in India where the company is estimated to have about 5,000 employees.

India is a key market for Google which has a major presence in Hyderabad and Bengaluru. Pichai recently launched the Google for India Digitization Fund with a commitment of investing ₹75,000 crore (about $10 billion) in the next 5-7 years towards digitizing the Indian economy.

Google’s WFH extension is in accordance with other MNCs extending their WFH policies as a precautionary measure.

For instance, e-commerce major Amazon has recently communicated that “employees who work in a role that can effectively be done from home are welcome to do so until 8 January, 2021.”

Alok Ohrie, president and managing director, Dell Technologies said in an earlier interview with Mint, that 100% of its workforce in India is enabled to WFH even before the covid-19 crisis.