Mumbai Rains haunts IT Market

Unfortunate as  tragedies are, they are times when people sit and take serious notice of how to deal with contingency situations. The recent monsoon floods in Mumbai, which caused untold damage to property and equipment, could well be a wake-up call for enterprises to do more than mere lip service to Disaster Recovery (DR) and business continuity practices (BCP).

In just 10 days, the city received 864.5 mm rain, which is nearly equal to what it gets in an entire month, the MeT department said. The entire logistics and communication have been brought to a standstill. Although the rains have stopped and the water has started receding, the IT community is in still in shock as they take stock of the massive losses that have been incurred due to the deluge.

The channel partners in the city were also hit with their businesses coming to a standstill. Talking about the incessant rains, Devang Shah of Oxford Telesystem who has an outlet in Malad, one of the worst hit areas said, “There had zero business on those days. Ours is a repairing business and we simply could not venture out as the trains were down.”

Baldev Singh Negi of Satguru Computers who is based in Andheri and Jignesh Mehta of Vel Tech in Borivali have similar stories to tell.

“We preferred not to open our shop in the face of such heavy rains. We were completely shut down during those four days,” said both Negi and Mehta. Speaking on the current situation Pawan Gupta of Front-men Computers who runs a chain of six outlets in the city stated that, “Though we were open on Wednesday we did not do any business as there were no customers. Due to this inclement weather we lost out on business of almost Rs 1-2 lakh.”