It’s been a week since Akhil Mishra, 25, a marketing and branding executive in a leading multinational company in Gurgaon has been fired. The reason for firing him has become an issue of debate in almost all companies across the city and the NCR. Akhil’s crime: he was caught accessing Orkut and Hi5 through proxy sites while the company had already blocked and restricted access to all social networking websites at work.

Akhil who had been working in the company for the last three years is disappointed with the way the company has reacted. “Chatting for an hour or two in the midst of a 12-hour schedule is reasonable and justified,” he said. Though all 20-something colleagues are also of the same opinion. The 40-plus IT administrators of the company have monitored and recorded several hours of chatting and thousands of hits on Orkut everyday.

But the latest buzz is that IT software and large corporation all over the country have started imposing restrictions on Internet usage in general and social networking sites like Orkut, Youtube, Fropper and MySpace in particular. The HR teams of these companies have accused these sites of being a major distraction, hampering productivity and efficiency of employees, increasing broadband costs and contributing to frequent job shifts.

“Scrapping was just for networking with people of similar taste; it caused no harm.” says Rashi Grover, a PR executive who has also been fired from her company for the same reason. Her company’s managers complain, “Employees have started using Orkut to share company information and database with people in other similar companies or working on similar product line and clients.”

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