They are notorious for raping, and even gangraping, their female passengers. They are a nuisance on roads and are as infamous for accidents as Delhi’s Blueline buses are. They frequently get into fights with other people on the roads, and more often than not bash them up black and blue. This they do, and have been doing so, with impunity. They are the illegitimate children of the spoilt-rotten BPO industry – the cab drivers.
Five people, including a 3-year-old girl, were injured on Tuesday night when a speeding call centre cab rammed into them while they were relaxing on a raised platform outside their residence in south-west Delhi. A call centre employee was killed in an accident in early August caused by a rash and negligent driver.
On August 9, three people were killed and as many critically injured when a cab carrying employees of the HCL call centre collided head-on with a truck on the DND flyover connecting Delhi with Noida. Even before this piece of news could sink in came the report of an employee of IBM in Pune being gangraped by 10 cab drivers. A few days later, a 70-year-old man, on his customary morning walk, was run over by a speeding call centre cab near India Gate in New Delhi. The cab, of course, sped away.
Statistics are tell-tale. Every fourth accident on the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway is caused by a speeding call centre cab. In Delhi, these vehicles are responsible for the death of five people every month. In the first seven months this year, the Delhi traffic police arrested over 1,000 call centre cab drivers for flouting traffic rules. In all, 7,753 call centre cab drivers were prosecuted and 2,907 vehicles were impounded this year. But to little avail.
Reports of similar incidents are becoming far too frequent for comfort. The only question that keeps rising in one’s mind is how on earth can these cab drivers get away with their acts with such impunity. All the time.
The refrain of cabbies is that they have to operate under severe time constraints and have no choice but to drive fast and rough. BPOs do not have an answer to this. Their contention that they insist on certified drivers somehow does not cut much ice. For it that were a veritable benchmark such incidents would not happen.
Like call centre employees, cab drivers too work under strenuous conditions. Maybe their predicament is more physically exacting. If that were to be true, BPOs definitely have a number of ways out – hire more cabs, ensure that drivers do not work for so many hours, whatever it takes to ensure that lives of their own employees as well as those who fall in the way of these drivers are not imperilled. And of course, install GPS devices to keep track of what’s happening.
There is nothing that cannot be done. If there is a will, the BPOs – our spoilt brats of globalisation – can surely find a way. Meanwhile, they keep either cutting corners, or passing the buck, or maybe just indulge in wanton cribbing.
