Chief executive officers (CEOs) of the business process outsourcing (BPO) units could now be held responsible for not ensuring safety of their employees, police commissioner B K Gupta said while briefing the lieutenant governor (LG) Tejendra Khanna on Monday.

The police commissioner's warning came in the backdrop of yet another crime against women in the capital city when a 30-year-old BPO employee from Mizoram was abducted from Dhaula Kuan and gang-raped in a moving vehicle last Wednesday.   

Khanna, in the meeting, attended by the police commissioner and the chief secretary, reportedly came down heavily on the Delhi police for its failure to ensure safety for women in Delhi. He sternly told the commissioner to make sure Dhaula Kuan gang-rape is the last such case.

Briefing the LG on the steps taken to ensure safety of call centre employees, Gupta said that he has told the CEOs of the BPOs that they could not escape responsibility in such cases and FIRs could be filed against them.

“Police chief said that in the last two days, they (police) have checked more than 1,500 BPO cabs between 1am and 5 am. The idea was to see if the drivers had valid identification proof and there were security guards present along with the employees,” said a source in the LG office who attended the meeting.

Police is also preparing a database of all the drivers and security guards who are deputed to drop BPO employees at odd hours. More effective patrolling is being considered at sensitive areas including Delhi university, ridge area and some points on ring road.

Meanwhile, this is not the first instance in the city where a woman is abducted by men in inebriated state and gang-raped in a moving vehicle. In 2005, in an identical incident, a 20-year-old Delhi university girl from Mizoram was also kidnapped from Dhaula Kuan late at night.

In March 2009, the Gurgaon police and the Business Processing Industries Association of India (BPIAI), parent body of BPOs, KPOs etc, had jointly worked out an extensive list of employees’ safety rules for call centre companies, cab drivers and women staff with stern instructions to adhere to them.

Some of these rules say that the women should not be picked up first or dropped last, identity cards have to be issued for all the drivers, call centre/BPOs’ names have to be highlighted on all vehicles, distress or panic buttons in the vehicles should be installed, breath analysers to be set up at security gates to ensure the drivers are not drunk, and most importantly GPS based online tracking system to be compulsorily fixed in all the vehicles.

Cab drivers were instructed to ensure that women are dropped right outside their homes and not at points from where they are picked up, no short cuts or unknown routes to be taken to drop them, no giving lifts to any unknown persons.

However, more than a year after this was formulated the situation remains the same and women stay a vulnerable lot in the city.

An activist with Jagori ngo working on women’s issues Ratna Manjari says, “Women are entitled to work at whatever time they wish. It is the responsibility of the company and the police to make sure that she is safe once she is on the road.”

But BPOs have a long way to go in securing their women employees. Unlike in Bangalore, the CEOs of BPOs in Delhi are not held accountable for maintain their women employees’ safety.

In the Pratibha Srikant Murthy rape case in Bangalore, the Karnataka government had registered a case against Som Mittal, the then managing director of Hewlett Packard Global Software Limited. Murthy, an employee of the company, was raped on December 16, 2005. 

Besides holding the top authority accountable, the companies could consider employing women cab drivers. The drivers and employees should have instant access to the police, ambulance and a functional women’s helpline. Technology, controlled by the BPOs, should be used to ensure that women are safely dropped and picked up instead of maintaining a manual register which can easily be manipulated. And alas, police needs to be more pro-active in night patrolling especially in sensitive areas.