HYDERABAD: If the ongoing Satyam saga is adding to its employees' woes day after day, one particular industry seems to be benefiting from it all.
It is the cyber cafes in the city which are witnessing a surge in business like never before even as the home-grown Satyam Computers is facing its worst times.
Flocking to these internet cafes are worried Satyamites who are logging on to job portals and posting their resumes.
"From 7 pm to the time we shut down, the cafe remains packed with most customers being Satyamites,'' says M Veeresham, owner of a cyber cafe in Secunderabad. He notes that the area where he owns a cafe has a lot of Satyamite residents and the number of his customers has increased by over 30 per cent ever since the first news of Satyam fraud broke out on January 7.
Most cafes charge Rs 20 per hour and their business has burgeoned in the last one week with Satyamites pouring into their cafe from early evening itself. "I have made close to Rs 5,000 since January 7 from net surfing charges alone. Apart from that, I have made Rs 2,000 from scanning charges," says Veeresham.
Employees say they can only access their official mail accounts and not personal ones in Satyam offices and therefore have to depend either on personal computers at home or cyber cafes to post their CVs. "Also, people like us who can access personal mail accounts, do not want to take the risk of anybody coming to know they are looking for jobs," says a Satyam associate.
"Most of them come to the cafe to upload their resumes. The scanning machine is also running overtime as a number of the employees are scanning and mailing copies of their CVs to employers and headhunters, apart from taking print outs of their CVs," says the owner of another cyber cafe in Begumpet. "But even though they are giving us good business it is sad to see the employees, who would usually come here to chat and surf the net, now come here with tense faces. Cafe owners also know that many employees come straight from work as they fear the cafe might get overcrowded if they are late," says P R Srinivas, another cafe owner.
Incidentally, it is through the Satyam related conversations among their customers that the owners come to know they are Satyamites. "In fact, I get my regular updates about Satyam not from news channels but from my customers as they discuss everything from Raju to the new management to their salary worries," says the Begumpet-based cafe owner.
