Bangalore BPO murders a cause for concern

Sufia Tippu
Thursday, 27 July 2006 03:56

IT Industry - Market

A BPO employee in Bangalore working for a call center was found stabbed to death on Wednesday. This is the second call centre murder that has taken place in the IT capital of the country in recent times.

Last December, the rape and murder of Pratibha Murthy, a HP call center employee hit the headlines and tightened the security measures in BPO units right across the country.

Tanya Bannerjee, 32, a native of Kolkata was living in Bangalore as a paying guest, a common arrangement for hundreds who come in droves to Bangalore to work in the 500-plus call centres. Just a month ago, she had joined a call center named 24/7 and was working on the Aviva account as an accident claims analyst for a UK company.

A male colleague who worked with her is suspect unlike in the earlier case where it was a rape and murder by an unknown cab driver.

There are about 300,000 call center agents working in captive call centers of MNCs such as HP, Dell, IBM-Daksh, Goldman Sachs, as well as third party pure play Indian BPO units in Bangalore.

The police are investigating the case where the motive is still unknown. “Investigations are moving at a fast pace and we are close to finding the killer. We will know whether she has been raped or not after the autopsy is done - circumstantial evidence is pointing out that no rape has taken place,” Bangalore police officials stated.

Early Wednesday morning the police received information that a mutilated body of a young woman was found lying near the Bangalore-Mangalore highway in the Shiradi Ghat, about 200 km from Bangalore.

The woman was wearing denim trousers and a shirt, an identity card was found on her led the police to establish her identity.

It was learnt that she had worked till 9 p.m. on Tuesday and had left the work place accompanied by a male colleague identified as in his car.

The call center management informed the police that Tanya refused to take the company van to return home in the last three days and had gone home with the colleague in his car on Tuesday. Both Tanya and the colleague had joined the call center on June 22 this year.

A number of reasons point to the colleague being the murderer. Police said that he had called Tanya's house in Kolkata and informed her parents that he had dropped Tanya at her accommodation at around 11 pm on Tuesday – which he had not.

Investigations had revealed that Tanya did not return home. Her roommate had received text message from Tanya's number at around 11 pm saying that she was not coming to the room that night but was instead going to Kolkata to celebrate her birthday. Soon after this, Tanya's roommate tried calling her but the phone remained switched off.

The next morning, Tanya's roommate learnt from her office that Tanya had left the workplace on Tuesday night with her colleague. So called him but he brusquely dismissed her queries.

The suspect had also told several colleagues at the call centre that she was married to him. According to Tanya's roommate, Tanya objected to this and was clearly not interested in marrying him.

According to the police, the suspect has been giving conflicting statements and the investigation is still on. “We are questioning him to find out why and who killed Tanya and what was the motive,” police officials said.

Statement from the company

In a joint statement Aviva Offshore Services CEO Rajnish Virmani and 24/7Customer COO S Nagarajan said: ``This is very shocking incident. We deeply empathize with the employee's family and are here to support them in their hour of grief. Aviva-24/7 is an extremely employee-friendly organization and is deeply committed to ensuring complete employee safety and security. We employ several measures towards achieving the highest standards of safety and security. It is very unfortunate that the employee did not opt for the company's transport outside working hours choosing instead to use her own means of commuting.''

The statement added: ``While one could link this as a problem of the `BPO industry' it is clearly a wider opportunity and area for us to work in collaboration with the local authorities to improve the safety standards in our cities. We are providing the authorities and investigators all the support in their investigation.''

Some of the safety measures in place:

*A security guard accompanies any cab that has a lady employee as the first / last pick-up between 7:00pm to 6:00am (in force after the HP call center agent’s rape and murder by cab driver)

*Company cabs prominently display the company logo.

*All drivers are registered with the local police authorities; provided with an identity cards too

* The Aviva-24/7 transport helpline assists employees to call and verify with authorities for any change in routes and timing of shifts.