The Hindu : Front Page : Security in Hitech city stepped up

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Dec 24, 2005

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Front Page

Security in Hitech city stepped up

Staff Reporter

Guards to escort women employees who are picked up first or dropped last

HYDERABAD: Following the rape and murder of Pratibha Srikant Murthy, a call centre employee, by a cab driver in Bangalore, security in the Cyberabad area, including Hi-tech city, has been tightened.

It has also been decided to have a security guard as an escort in every vehicle where the first pick up or the last drop is a woman.

Bangalore incident

This incident, right in the nerve centre of the IT capital, sent shock waves across the country forcing companies to re-examine their transport management systems.

Says Amit Prasad, CEO of city-based Satnav Technologies, which developed a vehicle tracking system in 2003 for GE Capital, now GENPACT, transport management systems figure lowest in the priority list of companies. And there were every few takers for the vehicle tracking system developed by his company.

But the Bangalore incident has changed that.

Vehicle tracking system

Now he is receiving many enquiries from call centre companies.

This system works like this: it first gives a geo-code to all employees' addresses. Next, it takes the details of vendors, their cabs and drivers. The call centre company's workforce management solution is fed as the base data in the software to develop routing plans.

With this information the software runs an algorithm to compute the routes to be taken, total number of vehicles required, including the number of escorts required, if the first pick up or drop is a woman.

"So as a manager you can alert your security agencies in advance or male colleagues," adds Mr. Prasad.

The MIS tracks the kilometres travelled. It can also generate transport bills and improve efficiency of facility management departments, adds Mr. Prasad.

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