CHENNAI: IT companies on OMR are asking employees to work from home . Reason? They don’t have water to sustain operations. These employees can work from any place of their convenience as their employers figure out, besides meeting targets, how to battle water shortage for the next 100 days. It has not rained for almost 200 days in the city and Chennai may not get sufficient rain to tide over the water crisis for the next three months.Sources said around 5,000 techies of 12 companies have been directed to work from home. “Last time IT companies asked employees to work from home was during a strike called by private tankers four years ago,” a source told TOI.OMR has about 600 IT and ITES firms operating out of IT parks between TIDEL Park at Taramani and SIPCOT IT Park in Siruseri. Firms here are adopting various methods to reduce water consumption. Ford Business Services at ELCOT, Sholinganallur, for instance, has asked its employees to bring drinking water.“Companies are using treated water for almost 55% of their needs and monitoring real-time use,” said Varun Sridharan, co-founder and CEO of Greenvironment, a tech-based water management startup. The focus on managing sewage treatment plants efficiently and utilising full outputs from it is at very high levels, he added.However, an admin manager of an IT firm said he was not sure how long the companies could function. “We are walking on a tight rope,” he said. Around 30% of the property taxes go towards water and sewage but we see no results, he said.OMR requires about three crore litres of water a day in summer, most of this is sourced from outside. Of this, 60% is used by IT firms and other offices. Representatives of IT firms from OMR approached Metrowater seeking support. Officials made promises but did not keep them. The crisis has hit the SIPCOT IT Park hard. Its 46 companies require two million litres of water a day and this was sourced from the 17 wells within the park. “But now only one million litres is sourced from the wells. The rest is provided by tankers,” a SIPCOT official said.Some IT firms have put up posters on water conservation. K Purushothaman, chief executive officer of K7 Computing, said some IT parks are looking at available water management policies to meet their requirement. “It is being pursued as water-starved OMR is frequently hit by flash strikes of water tanker associations in the absence of adequate water sources in the vicinity,” he said.