By Brinda Dasgupta BENGALURU: For job seekers, there is one more reason to consider SAP Labs India: the death benefit. SAP Labs’ ‘Care For Life’ employee benevolent fund will pay Rs 1 lakh a month for 10 years to the spouse and children of anyone who dies while being on the company’s payroll. If the employee is unmarried at the time of death, the parents will get Rs 65,000 a month and their healthcare costs will be taken care of as well. The idea is to give long-term support to the family members to ensure their quality of life doesn’t suffer much due to the death, which can drain them both emotionally and financially. “Lifestyle and stress-related issues are factors behind the demise of more and more people in the 30-40 year age brackets, and they leave behind spouses, who may or may not be working, as well as young children,” said Bhuvaneswar Naik, vice president of human resources at the Indian unit of German software major SAP. “As a progressive company, we want to focus on what our employee has left behind.” The Care For Life fund, launched three years ago, is fully employeemanaged. To join, an employee needs to contribute Rs 100 a month. Although participation is voluntary, about 99.5 per cent of its 8,100-odd India employees are part of the fund, which so far has disbursed about Rs 80 lakh to 30-35 employees in times of medical crisis – mostly to meet costs that go above or are not covered by insurance. It is rolling out the death benefit programme under the second phase, which starts on September 1. “The second phase will cover families of SAP employees in a much more sustained and structured way in the event of sudden demise,” said Dilipkumar Khandelwal, managing director at SAP Labs. The compensation will be provided with a three-tier approach: first, ensuring that the quality of education for the children does not change – that is, they are able to continue at the same school; second, ensuring the quality of healthcare access remains the same; and lastly, ensuring that the overall quality of life does not suffer till the spouse becomes financially independent, gets a job, or remarries. The fund will pay the children’s fees directly to the school, for which Rs 2 lakh a year per child will be kept aside. The spouse will continue to get the same insurance cover previously provided to the employee, the premium for which will be paid from the fund. The other component will be a monthly payment of Rs 65,000 towards living expenses. “The fund will provide a decent sum towards maintaining a good standard of living,” said Soumya R, the fund’s chairperson. “We want to ensure that no matter what the cause of death – be it heart attack or even suicide – the family gets what is rightfully theirs without having to go to anyone else.” This marks the first time a company in India is extending such sustained support in the event of an employee’s untimely demise. Google has launched a similar programme in the US in 2012 – it provides financial support to the spouse or domestic partner of Googlers who die while working at the company. “With heart attacks in mid-30s on the rise, we have tried to replicate the Google model to take care of the families our employees leave behind. We hope more companies adopt a similar policy for the larger good of the industry,” said Naik. The Care For Life fund in its earlier avatar also covered death, providing Rs 3 lakh in cash the day of the employee’s death, to meet funeral and other sudden expenses. “This is a welcome move, which will provide employees and their families with a sense of security,” said Anandorup Ghose, partner at global human resources solutions company Aon Hewitt. “While quite a few large Indian organisations have these programmes in spirit and do it for their employees when the situation arises, it is probably for the first time that such a structured programme is coming into effect.”