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New Delhi: The head of the country's main outsourcing industry body will be prosecuted for allegedly giving inadequate security to a female employee killed while travelling home after work.
Pratibha Srikanth Murthy, an employee of an Indian division of Hewlett-Packard Company, was being driven home in a company taxi after finishing her night shift in Bangalore when her driver raped and murdered her in December 2005, according to police.
Som Mittal was the managing director of Hewlett-Packard GlobalSoft at the time. He is now the president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM).
The government of Karnataka state, of which Bangalore is the capital, is prosecuting Mittal under a law governing employee safety, said Sanjay Hegde, counsel for Karnataka. The Supreme Court rejected his challenge to the charge yesterday.
Murthy's death prompted debate about the safety of women working the night shift in call centres and back offices across the country.
Hegde said the case was intended to be a signal to employers to do more to protect their employees and pay heed to the law.
In a similar case in 2007, police in Maharashtra state arrested a driver and another man for raping and murdering a female call centre employee in the city of Pune, close to Mumbai.
Although more than 19,000 women reported that they were raped in 2006, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, the call centre cases have been followed closely by the media.
In India, the last decade's explosion of call centres is seen as a symbol of the changing lifestyles of middle-class urbanites in a country where a generation ago, independent, high-paid, professional young women were much less common.
Under Karnataka's law, certain businesses must provide safe transport for female employees travelling to or from the office at night.
NASSCOM helped draw up a set of safety guidelines which said a guard must travel along with the driver in company taxis, and a female employee must never be the first to be picked up or the last to be dropped off.
If convicted, Mittal faces a "token" fine of just Rs1,000 (about Dh92), Hegde said.
Sanjay Hegde, counsel for Karnataka said the case was intendedto be a signal to employers to do more to protect their employees and pay heed to the law.
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