Challenges of Health Sustainability in IT-ITES Industry in India

Abstract

The information technology-information technology enabled services (IT-ITES) industry has become one of the significant growth catalysts for India. Besides being the dominant sector in India’s GDP, it has also contributed substantially to foreign investment flows, exports and employment. However, sustaining this impressive growth may not be possible in the long run as these companies are facing continuous challenges in terms of competition, scarcity of talent, health hazards of computer use, attrition of employees, data security and global slowdown. There are two major aspects of long run sustainability: (a) Economic Sustainability and (b) Social Sustainability. The objective of the present paper is to focus exclusively on the health-related problems of the social sustainability aspect. The basic aim is to identify and assess the major health-related problems of the IT professionals and build up a comparative framework to examine whether the morbidity and severity of the health problems (both physical and mental) is more acute in the case of IT-ITES employees as compared to the non-IT workers in terms of a primary survey. The study tries to explore whether there exists any interdependence between morbidity from the diseases, on the one hand and age, sex, marital status, nature of jobs, duration of work per day, work experience, on the other. This is being done in terms of Chi-square test for independence for categorical variables and binary logistic regression analysis. The analysis is based on a primary survey which has been done across four major cities of India, viz. Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Hyderabad for the period October 2016 to July 2017 covering both the IT and non-IT professional workings in different sectors. In doing this study, the Statistical Computer Packages ‘STATA’ and ‘E-views’ have been used.