SUDHIR CHOWDHARY

Green and black belts are back in demand at IT and BPO majors like Satyam, Wipro and Infosys, for entirely different reasons though. Having won these belts earlier pushing Six Sigma practices for quality and timely delivery of services, BPO pros are now logging into real martial arts.

The country’s ITeS-BPO segment is pushing for training in martial arts and self-defense techniques for its fast-growing women employees. The reason: prevent eveteasing, molestation and more serious and unfortunate incidents like the tragic murder of a BPO employee in Bangalore.

IT and BPO firms have started the process of teaching basic self-defense techniques to its women employees — 40-45% of 4.09 lakh employees in FY 2005-06. In NCR alone, women employees comprise 40% of about 2.5 lakh IT and BPO employees. And the employees and their employers are a content lot —while women feel a wee bit safer with their new-found skills, employers seem confident of keeping their competitive edge intact. Some even claim that attrition levels are stabilising with the talent acquisition being undertaken by the players, beginning to deliver results. Officials from Nasscom and Call Centre Association of India say, “the training is not restricted to Bangalore and NCR alone. It is assuming a pan-India proportion covering other BPO hotspots as well – Chandigarh, Jaipur, Nagpur, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata. State police departments along with some NGOs have come forward to train women employees and the companies too seem to be quite excited about this.”

Says TK Kurien, CEO, Wipro BPO, “It all started off with the fact that BPOs tend to hire more female employees...since the role is customer facing and companies would like to show a soft face. Majority of the BPO operations are during the night and the problem is with the drivers. There are very frequent cases of molestation, eve teasing, etc by the drivers.” He adds: “In the NCR alone, drivers form a huge floating population from neighbouring states like Haryana, Rajasthan, UP, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal. Most drivers are from villages and have had no interaction with females. Suddenly they come into a call centre environment which is a replica of New York or London. Cultural adjustments are the main reason.”

Karan Puri, head of contact center operations at iGate Global Solutions says, “The response we have got for our training on self-defense techniques has been positive. “We started the process of teaching martial arts to our women employees in Bangalore and plan to roll it out to other centers as well.”

Feedback received from majority of the BPOs – Convergys, Wipro BPO, Daksh and EXL – reveals that there are frequent cases of molestation, eve-teasing, etc by the drivers. Police verification is a major problem since the police has very limited resources or time to do this. Companies are fighting back by introducing various methods like: awareness classes for employees,training in self-defense techniques, interaction with police and driver briefings.

Says Mr Kurien, for majority of the BPOs, employee security is of utmost concern at least within the premises. And in the wake of recent incidents, companies have framed their own list of do’s and dont’s that are strongly enforced. Some of these include: The cabs are provided with radio-trunking facility to enable instant two-way communication with the control room. This is superior to cell phone communication. While training on safe driving techniques is a regular feature, security personnel keep track of every vehicle that enters and exits the company premises. Cabs that pick up or drop women employees after 9 PM have a security guard. The credentials of the security guards who accompany employees in the cabs are thoroughly checked and so on. Says Mr Puri, “Employees are excited about the self-defense techniques since most of them are very complacent and would tend to ignore danger.” Ironically, though, while this is becoming an industry norm, there is a danger of this losing steam because in order to maintain all this, financial resources are required. And BPOs especially are cost-conscious since they work on low margins.