Satyam recruits outside the Hyderabad office on Wednesday. (Reuters)

Hyderabad, Jan. 29: One girl hadn’t bothered to reply to an offer from Infosys. Another had turned down a proposal for marriage.

Yesterday, they were among a crowd of 300-odd young men and women who had gathered outside the office of Satyam Infocity in Hyderabad.

All of them had been picked during campus recruitments last August and were to join this month, some on foreign assignments after three months of training. Thanks to the scam, they are still waiting.

“We want to become part of Satyam. We know the role of Ramalinga Raju is just like a cloud over a sunny evening. I am confident the company will do better eventually and I would like to be part of it,” said Gopa Kumar Harnahalli from Karnataka, displaying his offer letter.

Gopa, Kharagpur girl Debjani Dutta and Chhattisgarh’s Saraswati Singh, who had chosen “career” over marriage, were part of the 300 who had started gathering outside the Hitech City office of the fraud-stricken IT company from 8.30 in the morning.

Armed with placards urging their prospective employer to break its silence, they gathered in lawns opposite the office, blocking traffic and movement of employees.

In small groups of 15 to 20, they stopped employees coming out and pleaded with them for information.

The company’s HR team later invited some representatives of the protesters for talks. “The HR leaders said they were not in a position to give any assurance. They said a decision would be made only after a new CEO is appointed,” said Ravi Teja Padiri, who heads the Radical Democratic Corporate Employees Congress, which took up the cause of the aspirants.

The representatives also claimed that the HR team had told them Raju was “already history” in the corridors of Satyam and work was on at full speed.

The company had shortlisted some 7,000 people for recruitment from January onwards. But their hopes of a promising takeoff with the country’s fourth-largest IT firm were grounded after founder-chairman B. Ramalinga Raju, now cooling his heels in jail, admitted to a Rs 7,000-crore fraud.

“I was thrilled when I got the offer letter in December. I didn’t even respond to online offers from Infosys and TCS,” said Debjani.

“I even rejected a marriage proposal in anticipation of a career with Satyam,” added Saraswati, who came from Raipur to join recruits from Bengal, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Delhi for the protest, though most of them were from Andhra Pradesh.

The crowd swelled by the minute. Less than 20 around 8.30, it was 200-strong by 9.30. By 1pm, the number had risen to 300.

The organisers of the protest said they had not expected so many recruits to turn up. “But the online response is more massive, about 4,000,” Padiri said.

Employee number

The provident fund regional office has revealed that the number of employees at Satyam was 43,622. PF officials went to Ramgopalpet police station in Hyderabad yesterday to lodge a complaint against the former management for not depositing Rs 7.5 crore as the 43,622 employees’ share of PF for November 2008.

However, the company said today the headcount was more than the number given out by the PF office because Satyam employs many foreign nationals who do not fall under India’s PF regulations.