New Delhi: A pen drive is the culprit and call centre employees provided personal and confidential information,’ says a story to be aired on Channel 4 on Thursday. Pat comes the BPO industry in India’s reply to the story – ‘Impossible’.Suddenly everybody wants to know exactly how secure data is in Indian BPOs. Members of the industry hasten to assure the world that the data is very secure indeed.Says WIPRO Vice President, Charan Bhalla, “When employees walk into work, they do have pens, papers or pencils in their hands and without these, they cannot record any data.” And that’s not all, the BPO industry says they are taking a number of steps to root out rogue agents.

• Employees are being encouraged to become part of a database that carries out background checks on them. 25,000 employees have already registered and they account for 30 per cent of the top 24 BPOs.
• An independent body is also being setup to enfore privacy and data protection standards in the industry.
• Amendments are also being made to the IT act to plug any loopholes.

However, lawyers point out that Indian laws are already strong as far as data security is concerned.
Says advocate Karnika Seth, “Such offenses of data protection are not limited only to Section 43. Other sections also get attracted like the IPC for cheating.”

The general consensus seems to be that a few bad apples are threatening to spoil the party for everybody.