The bandh in support of Samaikyandhra paralysed functioning in various IT units in the city on Tuesday.
About 70-odd small and big IT companies in the city and about 20-odd companies in the IT Special Economic Zone at Rushikonda and Special Economic Zone, Duvvada, were severely affected.
Most of 12,000 employees working in IT and IT-enabled services could not attend work for want of public transport and stoppage of their two-wheelers at various places.
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The IT units could run only important business required for 24/7 services of their international clients. This also was disrupted for sometime with bandh supporters approaching the managements to observe strike.
“Samaikyandhra strike, if it continues, will lead to collapse of IT work and employment in Vizag as international clients do not like to outsource work, where there is instability and uncertainty,” owner of a software company said.
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President and vice-president of Rushikonda IT Park Association P. Vishnu Kumar Raju and O. Naresh Kmar visited the relay hunger camps at the Collectorate, GVMC, Andhra University, APSRTC, Maddilapalem depot, and lawyers at the Collectorate.
They said grave injustice was done to this area and Rs.50,000 crore of IT business was from Hyderabad alone and only Rs.1,200 crore from rest of Andhra Pradesh. Rest of AP minus Hyderabad accounted for just 3 per cent of total exports.
The RITPA team said thousands of crores of valuable land was auctioned by VUDA and the proceeds from the sale were invested for developing Hyderabad. “It’s a big loss to Vizag,” they said.
About APEDCL, they said even though it was the best distribution company in the country it was given lowest allocation of 15.7 per cent in the State. A sum of Rs.3,000 crore was diverted to the central pool to provide power to Hyderabad while imposing severe power cuts and penalties for violation of peak hour load restriction, they stated.