Latest News about Ahmedabad – The gangrape of a 22-year-old BPO employee in Pune has sent shockwaves across the huge call centre workforce in the city. How safe are BPO employees in Ahmedabad? As BPO and KPO centres mushroom in the city and employ a sizeable number of women staff, the big question is, if safety measures are in place and adequate enough.
Ahmedabad, a tier II city, is fast emerging as a favourite destination for the Information Technology (IT) and IT-enabled services (ITES) companies as they offer a cost benefit over prime cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi among others.
An increasing number of women and college-going girls is also opting for these call centre jobs due to the lucrative pay packets. The BPOs, KPOs and other call centres employ more than a lakh emoployees in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar alone.
Chief Operating Officer & cofounder, Motif, Parul Mehta says, “Safety of our employees is our biggest concern and our prime responsibility is to provide a safe environment to our women employees . We have 35 per cent women staffers in our company and we make sure of all safety precautions are in place for them.”
Mehta adds that the company has made it a point that women employees are not the last ones to be dropped and also that the transport manager and his team check the credentials of the drivers thoroughly before employing them.
Senior officials of various BPOs in the city are of the opinion that they are taking all possible steps to ensure that women employees were dropped home safely and they do have a proper mechanism in place to scrutinize the past history of all staffers, starting from those at the top of the corporate ladder to cab drivers.
In March, the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) had come out with a ‘Code of Conduct’ to ensure physical security of employees in the BPO sector.
The NASSCOM code of conduct provides guidance on four counts – security during the commute, transport and security vendor selection, employee communication and security within the premises.
About the adherence to NASSCOM’s Code of Conduct, Chirag Mehta, CEO of Icenet says, “The BPO units in Ahmedabad are in the process of implementing this code of conduct. The industry is very conscious about these safety issues and efforts are moving in the right direction.”
About policing on BPOs, senior police inspector, Satellite police, JJ Patel, says that they have given instructions to call centre executives about safety measures and if possible, have a guard as escort in cars ferrying female executives working in night shift. “However, we always try to keep a check on vehicles passing late in the night. Women can dial 100 in case of emergency. The nearby police officials on patrol will reach the spot,” he said.
BPOs AT A GLANCE
Number of BPOs and other call centres in Ahmedabad – About 40
Number of employees employed in the sector – 50,000 to 1 lakh
Potential to add over 35,000-40,000 in coming years
Major players – Motif India Infotech Pvt. Ltd, Ahmedabad, Azure, Effective Teleservices, Apcons Info tech, among others.
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Just due to few dicks ferrying female employees ladies suffer the brunt or should i say traumatic experience is pretty nasty and disgusting in the first place.Such retards should be punished with their dick chopped off and shoved into their ars and den made to take a walk in his area.Moreover coming to the point the question right now doesn't hold any significance in the first place as hardly women prefer working night and thats the time when most of the call centres starts buzzing.So for this city we don have to create much hue and cry in the first place. Secondly there are few BPOs mushrooming in the city which does provide pick &drop facility.So we need not to worry if we talk about Ahmedabad.And if companies aint providing pick and drop den females don't even think of giving a shot in most cases. the company i am working in got a strenght of over 5o employees including just 2 females! we can figure it out wat scene does ahnedabad BPO fraternity carries.
…..gary,project manager.