The city police commissioner, Ajai Singh, has convened a meeting of all BPO managements to discuss the safety of their women employees,

Hewlett Packard, for whom Pratibha was working and which hires about 206 vehicles for transporting its call centre workers, is now rehauling its security measures.

The crime has shocked the city‘s high-technology and back office industries, which employ 250,000 workers to do everything from writing computer programs to handle calls from American credit card users. Nearly half the workers are women.

Many of those employees work nights so they can take calls during what is the daytime in North America and Europe, making it one of the few industries in India where women work late shifts. That has long raised concerns in India, where the streets of many cities are dangerous for women after dark.

The 24 year old woman disappeared after being picked up for her job at a Hewlett-Packard offshore centre on the outskirts of Bangalore. Her body was found in a suburban field. The driver, Shiv Kumar, was arrested and confessed to killing her, police said. An autopsy indicated she was raped before being slain, said Indian media.

In response to the crime, police have asked companies to start providing escorts for female employees from their homes to their workplaces, said Bhupendra Singh Sial, the police chief of Karnataka state, of which Bangalore is the capital.

Cab companies contracted to take the workers to and from their jobs were also asked to give photos and work histories for their drivers, he said.

“Things have changed very rapidly for us in the past five or six years,“ says Ritu Anand, vice president for human resources at Tata Consultancy Services, India‘s largest outsourcing company, according to Information Weekly.

“Women here were very submissive in the past and were concerned primarily about family life. Now they want to do something for themselves.“

In many cases, that means going to college and joining India‘s booming IT industry.

According to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, women will represent about one-third of India‘s IT workforce by 2007, up from an almost negligible number several years ago.

It‘s not immediately clear if other Western companies will alter their own security policies in light of the incident. A spokesman for IBM would not comment. “We don‘t talk about our security arrangements,“ says the spokesman. Officials at Microsoft, another U.S. high-tech company with significant operations in India, also declined to comment.

More broadly, some companies say they‘re taking steps to ensure the comfort and safety of their growing female workforce. Sierra Atlantic, which provides software development services in Hyderabad, now conducts an annual woman‘s day event. “There is a lot of role playing and seminars on how women can achieve a satisfying work/life balance and deal with issues that might come up in the office,“ says Nitya Nivali, senior VP for human resources at the company.

Officials at Indian tech companies say the country‘s increasingly strained labor market means their future success depends on attracting a steady stream of qualified, female employees. “We won‘t be in a position to sustain our growth unless women from all sectors of Indian society can participate,“ says TCS‘s Anand.

The question is whether Indian companies, and the country itself, can move quickly enough to resolve the many issues, including personal safety, that will continue to arise as women join India‘s workforce at an unprecedented pace. Some things won‘t change. “The fact is, women have to work the night shift because much of our industry operates at night,” says Nivali.