The Hindu Business Line : Nasscom may include vendors' employees in IT/BPO database

MOVED by the brutal murder of an MNC call centre employee in Bangalore, the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) is looking at extending the scope of a proposed `employee registry' project to cover vendors' employees. This measure would enable call centre companies to run verification checks on the employees of transport and security agencies they hire.

"The industry takes the issue seriously and needs to continue upgrading the security systems... We were intending to include vendors' employees as part of IT/BPO employee database. The entire project is under testing," the Nasscom Vice-President, Mr Sunil Mehta, told Business Line here.

Vendor database mandatory: Under the proposed programme, while the IT/BPO employee database would be `voluntary,' the vendor database could be made mandatory by organisations. Besides transport and security agencies, the vendor database will also include agencies hired for catering and housekeeping activities by BPO and call centre companies.

"The database will have the details of employees of the vendors, and the vendor agencies will give BPO companies an authorisation to run background checks on their employees. The verification would be done by a background checking agency," he said, adding that the full programme would be launched in the second half of January.

The database for BPO employees, on the other hand, would require authorisation by the candidate himself. It would include details such as the name, educational qualification, professional qualification, previous employment information, photograph and fingerprint on the National Securities Depository Ltd (NSDL) database. The prospective employers can then choose to run background checks on the candidate. In the second phase, the database will also include a separate field on pending criminal cases.

Increased harassment: Nasscom is learnt to have received requests from 3-4 well-known BPO players, stating that the proposed database should also cover vendor's employees. In recent weeks, there have been several incidents of women professionals being harassed while returning home at night from work, often by drivers hired to take BPO employees to and from the workplace.

In November this year, two women scribes of a news channel were reportedly chased and attacked near Nizamuddin flyover in Delhi. Investigations had revealed that the car used by the culprits had been hired by a call centre to ferry its employees.