Wipro BPO's employee in Pune is raped and murdered

Came across a gruesome piece of news this evening. Not able to get it out of my head.

Wipro staffer raped, killed in Yahoo! News

An employee of a Wipro-owned call centre was found murdered off the old Mumbai-Pune highway on Saturday. Jyoti Chowdhary (22) - whose body was found at Gahunje village, 130 km from Mumbai - was probably strangled, police said. Two drivers hired by the call centre in Hinjewadi IT Park were arrested and charged with murder.

Police said they are awaiting the post-mortem report to see whether Chowdhary was sexually assaulted. Police Inspector Prakash Suryavanshi said one of the arrested drivers, Purushottam Borate, used to drop Chowdhary to her office from her home. The other accused, Pradeep Kokade, is a friend of Borate's.

Confirming that Chowdhary was an employee, Wipro BPO president T. K. Kurien said in a statement: "There has been a criminal manipulation of our processes. We had put several processes in place, including 'no first pick up or last drop' of female staffers, compulsory rosters for every taxi, ongoing education of employees on personal safety, precautions to be followed during late-night travel. Unfortunately, even the most secure processes get manipulated. We have initiated an audit to further tighten all processes, especially those concerning employees' safety."

Chowdhary used to stay in Pune's Pashan area with her sister and brother-in-law Gauravsunder Prasad, who had lodged a missing persons complaint with the police. The complaint stated that Jyoti had been missing since November 1. Ranjan Kadam, sub-inspector with the Talegaon Dabhade police, told HT that Chowdhary's body was taken to Talegaon General Hospital for the post-mortem and the findings would be sent to the government laboratory. This is the second such incident in Pune. A few months ago, a call centre driver had thrown acid on a girl in Kalyaninagar.

BPO shocker exposes lapses in Telegraph India

A woman call-centre employee who thought nothing of boarding the pool car though there was a stranger sitting beside the driver was raped and murdered by the duo in Pune.

The attack on Jyoti Choudhary, 22, who worked with Wipro’s call centre Spectramind, has revealed lapses and loopholes in the security revamp BPOs claim to have carried out after a rape-murder in Bangalore two years ago.

Jyoti was the first employee to be picked up by the car that arrived at her home in Pune’s upscale Pashan locality at 10pm on Thursday.

Engrossed in a cellphone conversation with her boyfriend, she probably didn’t realise the car had taken a wrong turn and was on Pune-Mumbai Expressway till the mobile was rudely snatched from her.

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Wipro officials said no non-employees were allowed in pool cars and that Jyoti, according to the company security drill, should have refused to get in and called the office help desk.

BPOs are also supposed to send a security guard along if a woman is the first to be picked or the last to be dropped. The official spokesperson of Wipro BPO, however, said Jyoti was second on the pick-up list but the male employee who was first skipped work that night.

In such instances, the driver is supposed to pick up the second male on the list and go back for the woman employee, he said.

“She (Jyoti) should have called the central help desk and asked for another car with an escort.”

Jyoti’s boyfriend didn’t suspect anything when the call was “disconnected”. When he failed to get in touch early next morning, he called her sister.

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Wipro officials said they hadn’t really expected Jyoti to turn up since she had resigned and Thursday was her last day in office – a claim the police confirmed. Calls to her mobile were being diverted to her voice mailbox anyway, company officials said.

Of the two men to be picked up by the same car after her, one had called to say he wasn’t coming while the second rang the driver when the car didn’t arrive at the scheduled time of 10.40pm.

The driver told him he had a flat tyre and the employee informed the help desk. The car picked him up at 12.40am, and the driver then did two more rounds of pick-ups and drops and stayed on duty till 7am.

Wipro cabbie not new to crime, say cops in Times of India

The call centre cab driver accused of raping and killing a 22-year-old Wipro BPO employee in Pune, has a history of crimes, cops revealed on Sunday, raising serious concern over security of women working in night shifts.

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According to police, on Thursday night, Borate and Kokade were heavily under the influence of alcohol when they picked up Jyotikumari from her home. She was told that they would be picking up a male employee before going to Wipro BPO at the Rajiv Gandhi infotech park at Hinjewadi. Instead, they took her to a desolate place at Gahunje village along the Pune-Mumbai expressway where they allegedly raped her before strangling her and smashing her head with a heavy stone.

Police said Jyotikumari pleaded and screamed for mercy after she was raped and promised she would not tell anybody about the incident. However, the duo killed her in an attempt to cover up their crime. Borate resumed his work after the crime and dropped other employees to Hinjewadi. Jyotikumari's body was found on Friday morning. Thursday night was to be Jyotikumari's last day at work at Wipro BPO.

Inspector Rajendra Patil, the investigating officer, told TOI that Borate and Kokade told his interrogators that it was a planned crime. "They had chosen Jyotikumari as their victim and also the place where the crime would be committed," said Patil.

BPO cabbies' profiles not checked in Times of India

Every night when thousands of young Indian women leave home to work in the "US or UK shift" at a BPO, their family members skip a heartbeat and remain tensed till these women return safe the next morning.

The cry for safe transportation continues to be the central concern for BPO employees who witness frequent incidents of rash driving, over-speeding and accidents involving their pick-and-drop/BPO vehicles. Cases such as rape and murder of an employee, acid attack or assault by drivers also get reported from BPO hubs across India. All this is soon forgotten until the next incident grabs the headlines.

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Also, while the galloping pace of the BPO industry has generated parallel employment for cab drivers, a large number of BPO fleet operators have clearly failed to pay enough attention to the quality or background of these drivers.

This news is particularly chilling for us (myself and thousands of other Indians) because we have female siblings, relatives and friends who work in Indian tech industry, travelling at odd hours in cabs and rickshaws. Just like the boyfriend of the victim in this latest incident, we have been on the phone with our relatives and friends, while they travelled to or from their offices at odd hours. It is all too easy to imagine the worst happening to our near and dear ones...

It is not just the female employees who are in danger. Just this morning, I read several reports of male employees of tech companies in Bengalooru being assualted, kidnapped and murdered for their money. Some of these incidents involved crimbes by drivers of cabs for the companies of the victims.

In Dec 2005, when writing about another rape and murder incident of a BPO employee in Bangalore, I had quoted Wipro's measures to ensure the safety of their employees as a good example of what should be done. Ironically, this latest incident has happened despite those measures being in place. Rules and processes are only as good as how well they are practiced.

Being a tech industry insider I know that not all rules and processes are followed - this includes even the processes that are part of our core work. Over a period of time, things become lax, omissions and errors creep in. Every company's management is aware of this. As such, Wipro (and other companies) should have more stringent reviews and audits in place to ensure that the rules which affect the physical security of their employees should be practiced with no lapses.

I know that the rules governing the security of the office locations, gates, access to certain areas, cameras inside the office, etc. are very stringently practiced in Wipro. So, it is difficult to understand how in the matter of employee's physical safety, there could have "been a criminal manipulation of our processes", as admitted by T K Kurien, Wipro BPO's president himself.

But I am not blaming the company alone. Every individual also has a responsibility to be extra vigilant and take precautions for personal safety. The lamentable and ineffective state of law enforcement and judicial system in India makes criminals incredibly brazen, almost to the point of being stupid. Yet, they get away with their crimes more often than not, which is what makes them so brazen and reckless. In such an atmosphere nobody can afford to be careless when it comes to personal safety.

The perpetrators of this crime should get the most stringent punishment and hope they get it soon. The criminal of the 2005 rape and murder case in Bengalooru I referred to earlier, has still not been sentenced, while the trial proceedings drag on. This despite that case being pursued in a 'fast track' manner by the court system!

Hopefully, this incident makes everyone extra vigilant.