“Employees are gripped by fear from the suddenness and the intensity of the second Covid wave,” she said. “The shortage of ICU beds, oxygen and medical supplies only adds to the anxiety and panic.”

While India’s coronavirus outbreak has infected 29 million and left more than 350,000 dead, the effect on citizens’ mental health has spread even wider. Tech companies like HCL realise the psychological impact on workers and their families will endure beyond the pandemic’s peak.

HCL and peers like Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services have long been at the vanguard of employee welfare in India, in part because of a philosophy that a healthy workforce tends to lead to a healthy business. Managers stress work-life balance, while in-house psychologists like Laxmi have been standard for years.

But even these companies aren’t sure how to navigate Covid’s desolation. Tens of thousands of employees who worked assiduously though the pandemic’s first wave are now reporting panic attacks, phobia, extreme mood swings and incapacity. The companies’ task is more difficult because employees are toiling through harrowing circumstances while clients in places like New York and San Francisco begin to resume normal lives.

“During the weeks when the wave climaxed, many companies estimated a 50 per cent to 60 per cent productivity drop,” said Ashutosh Sharma, vice-president and research director at Forrester Research, which studies employee productivity.

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Amid fears that such issues could damage India’s US$194 billion tech services industry – the country’s most important – companies are trying everything from more therapy and counselling apps to yoga and mindfulness sessions. They’re even coaching managers to take it easy on staff, at least for now.

“So many young people are traumatised after seeing death up close,” said Apparao V.V., chief human resources officer at HCL, whose clients include Cisco Systems, Airbus SE and University of California, Berkeley. “Many don’t recognise what they’re going through.”

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One relatively new treatment that’s catching on is counselling via smartphone apps, which offer sessions through chatbots or one-to-one coaching with live counsellors. Google-backed Wysa, one such start-up, has tripled its active users over the past year to 300,000.

“At least 50 per cent of the workers in any company are dealing with some kind of grief,” said Jo Aggarwal, co-founder and chief executive officer of Wysa, whose AI-guided bot provides 24-hour support. “No company can bury their head in the sand after such a mass tragedy.”

The start-up has increased its client base from one company pre-Covid to 30 currently. Consultant Accenture, with 200,000 staff in India, and analytics provider Fractal Analytics are among those whose workers have sought help with issues like insomnia, anxiety and grief.

Tata Consultancy Services, Asia’s largest outsourcer, has been experimenting too. It’s conducting yoga and meditation sessions for employees, and delivering well-being nudges digitally to their desktops. It has retrained managers to become what they call “Emotional Health first aiders”, so they show more empathy and sensitivity to colleagues stricken with grief and depression.

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The outsourcer Mphasis has treated the crisis like an all-hands emergency. The firm developed its own wellness app called Reach for staff and put together a No-Panic Covid mental wellness handbook. It also set up a telephone support line with professional counsellors for its 30,000 employees in May – which now handles as many as 10 calls an hour.

Nitin Rakesh, the company’s CEO, said companies everywhere should give special consideration to the toll of the last 18 months on the human psyche.

“This is a time for all of us to be compassionate leaders,” Rakesh said. “The second wave of Covid-19 has disproportionately impacted India, making it imperative to provide timely resources and offer the maximum protection possible to all our colleagues and their families.”

Rakesh, who’s based in New York, has been personally contacting employees every day.

There is a cultural hurdle companies need to cross as they help staff. Consulting a psychologist or a psychiatrist is often taboo in India so companies sometimes camouflage their support. Workers are given access to “life coaches” not psychologists, and they’re measured on a “happiness index”, rather than an anxiety or depression scale.

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This may be one of the draws of a smartphone app like Wysa. Employees can tap the service with anonymity; if they use an AI bot, they don’t even communicate with another human being. Yet Aggarwal, the start-up’s CEO, says the collective trauma that India is going through is also changing the culture of the country. The grief, anxiety and trauma are so widespread there is more openness to treatments.

“Something is very different now,” she said. “Covid has opened the doors to workplace conversations about mental health.”

There’s also a generational issue. At HCL, the median age of the workforce is 28 so many of the employees who have lost family members and are feeling overwhelmed are quite young.

“IT companies will have to lead the way in India in sensitising employers,” Laxmi said. “We have a long way to go.”