PUNE: Indian IT services firms are estimated to have brought back more than 2,000 employees and their families, stranded overseas on account of the Covid 19-induced travel bans.

Companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, Tech Mahindra and Wipro have a significant employee base at client locations, primarily in the US, as well as the UK, Australia, Japan and Europe. Now, with most these countries imposing movement restrictions and work-from-home regimes since mid-March, several employees had been keen to return home, the companies said.

In some cases, the employee’s visa was about to lapse and the person would have to be brought anyway. Some people who had gone abroad for short-term assignments, too, got stranded as flights suddenly got cancelled.

Last week, both Wipro and Tech Mahindra had chartered flights to bring back hundreds of employees and their families from the US.

“Last week, we have also brought back employees from Japan, and are working towards bringing back associates who are stranded in similar situations from other locations like Europe and Australia,” said Harshvendra Soin, global chief people officer and head of marketing at Tech Mahindra.

A Wipro spokesperson said, “Employees were also brought home from the UK via the Vande Bharat Mission flight. These included employees whose visas have either expired or are close to expiry. Plans are afoot to organize charter flights from Australia later this month.”

While companies said they are primarily driven by the safety and wellbeing of their employees, experts said there is also a strong business case for bringing back the employees as demand for people onsite has come down with everyone working remote.

“It helps to save or realign the cost also for service providers. If someone who is not required overseas is kept overseas, it adds to the cost for service providers,” said Pareekh Jain, founder of outsourcing advisory firm Pareekh Consulting. “This is a proactive measure by service providers to realign their operations and cost without waiting for commercial travel to become normal,” he said.

In most cases, service providers, who are sitting on a considerable amount of cash on their balance sheets, have taken to chartering flights for their employees.

At Tata Consultancy Services, it has been a mix of chartering flights in collaboration with other companies and working with the government to get seats for their employees on the Vande Bharat repatriation flights, a company spokesperson said. The company is estimated to have brought back about 900 of its employees from abroad since the pandemic attack.

Infosys is estimated to have brought back a few hundred.

Mid-size tech firm Mindtree has brought back about 130 employees along with their families from multiple geographies.

“Some people are sitting on an H-1B and it’s best you bring them back and take them back (to the US) at an appropriate time,” Mindtree CEO Debashis Chatterjee said. “We did a thorough due diligence and saw who to bring back. People also want to be closer to their families.”

One of Tech Mahindra employees who came back with this family from Dallas last week said the company had put in a lot of effort and care into bringing them back and that the families were pleased about being back.