Industry Urges Laptop/Mobile Delivery and Maintenance to be brought under Essential Services

The government came out with a list of essential services that will remain operational during the nationwide lockdown. Essential services mean services that the interruption of which would endanger the life, health or personal safety of the whole or part of the population.

However, what about the PCs, and Mobiles and services which are probably the most important entities for everyone working from home as per PM Modi’s appeal?

During the lockdown, people have become more dependent on mobile, PCs and laptops. Nearly 100% of apps run on the approx. 400 million smartphones and people are using these apps for living during lockdown to order food, groceries, monitoring their health.

Even for ordinary citizens and office goers, the ability to work from home and isolate from each other necessarily requires lakhs of employees to use such devices. A lot of office goers have turned to online collaboration tools to help them work from home. These tools are also enabling schools to begin the new academic session as many educational institutes have begun conducting online classes for their students.

Senior citizens and those with underlying health conditions are most susceptible to COVID 19. In such cases, the fatality rate is upwards of 10%. The disease is such that all times, the patients need to fend for themselves from the time they communicate with municipal authorities regarding symptoms to testing and treatment. This entire chain of activities required such categories of citizens to have 24X7 access to ready and working these devices.

The Government officials, hospitals, doctors, police, civil defense, disaster management personnel, officials ensuring the provision of utilities such as electricity, water, sanitation, and the running of the municipal body also dependent on these devices.

All of these require the regular maintenance, repair, service and the replacement of devices with new ones, where needed.

However, the many industry associations have reached out to Government and urged to classify mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and other information and communications technology (ICT) products as essential services during the coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown.

What IT industry says

“Mobile Handsets, tablets, and laptops have turned out to be the most efficient, effective and easy to use tools available with the Consumers and Government alike on India’s epic fight against COVID 19. Whether almost the entire population of the nation barring essential service sectors who are operating from home or the critical service providers donning the frontier battle lines against COVID 19. These ICT devices especially mobile phones/ Smart Phones are acting to be the backbone of India’s communication and digital footprints”, said Pankaj Mohindroo, President, ICA.

“60% of our economy is currently working. The sectors including Government, Police, Hospitals, Telecom, ISP, Utilities, Financial Institutions, Data Centers, SMB, Schools, Universities, and WFH today run on PCs, laptops, networking, servers, Mobiles, and Dataco products. Countries like Europe, the US, and even China have notified ICT products and services as an essential commodity as these products are the core of the Digital Infrastructure,” said Nitin Kunkolienker, President, MAIT.

“We are working with various industry associations to propose to the Government the inclusion of IT products under essential commodities. In the scenario of lockdown, social distancing and encouragement to Work from Home, IT products become an absolute necessity and hence, should get an exemption from the Government”, said Rajesh Goenka, Director, Sales & Marketing, RP tech India.

“Since PM Modi urged companies to allow employees to work from home, the demand for IT products includes Desktops, laptops and peripherals have been significantly increased. It is very essential that PC, laptops, servers and networking products should be declared under the essential services list”, said Kaushik Pandya, President, FAIITA.

The Government should look into this matter and add PCs, Mobile Phones/ Devices and support services to be a part of essential services in the current scenario.