Information technology major Wipro said on Wednesday that the 100-odd recruits who had been asked to work in its BPO division against their wishes would be transferred to Wipro Technologies after 12-18 months.

The company also confirmed that these recruits would get the salaries that were promised to them when they were selected for Wipro Technologies through campus interviews last year.

The engineering graduates had been rallying against the company over the past few days for changing their offer letters and reducing the scale of pay.

Wipro clarified that the graduates would join the BPO as technical support engineers and not as call operators. On Monday, when one of the protesting engineers was asked why they were against joining the BPO, he had said: “I don’t want to answer queries like ‘I have spilled coffee on my keyboard, what do I do?’ That’s not what I have been trained for.”

“Their salary stack will remain the same and we have committed ourselves to move them into IT service between 12 and 18 months. Their experience at the BPO will be counted as experience in IT services,” said Pradeep Bahirwani, the vice-president of Wipro’s talent and acquisition department.

Bahirwani said the engineers recruited from campuses in 2007 had been offered roles in the BPO division because the economic slowdown had led to projects drying up.

“We hire from campuses a year in advance and we could not have foreseen the present economic scenario,” he said.

The joining dates of over 10,000 campus recruits are still uncertain. Bahirwani said campus placements would “slow down in the near future”.

Bahirwani and other Wipro officials met the recruits and IT minister Debesh Das on Wednesday. “Most of our demands have been met,” said Sayantan Mukherjee, a graduate from the Bengal Institute of Technology.