BPO Backlash

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<b>Crying shame </b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->What makes the scandal intolerable is that Bahree got the data from his workplace and from friends and acquaintances at other call centres. The Sun showed the data to security experts who authenticated it. Bahree, according to the mass-selling tabloid paper, boasted that he could sell as many as two lakh account details, including those of American banking customers, every month.

This exposure comes on the heels of another scandal, involving Mphassis, sixteen of whose employees were arrested in April for a $350,000 online credit-card fraud involving Citibank customers. Nasscom, the Indian software lobby, has been quick to react this time, calling the exposure “terrible”, and saying it is in the process of establishing a national registry of IT employees in response to mounting concern over the security of out-processed data.

But the government’s response has been typically nonchalant. Describing it as a freak occurrence, the communications and IT minister, Dayanidhi Maran, said, “Please remember that incidents like this happen all over the Western world. We do not believe that it is a matter for us to get into, as it relates to private parties.” <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> <b>Henry Kissinger in the Seventies called Indians deceitful and untrustworthy, and we have generously and shamelessly kept to that image in all these decades. </b>

When did we start going corrupt and crooked? Mrs Indira Gandhi is often described as the fountainhead of corruption, but political corruption began before her time, in her father, Nehru’s regime, when the Mundra and Jeep scandals were exposed, one incidentally by her own husband. But political corruption as we see it today was her creation, she established what is called the license-permit-quota raj, and it has never been wholly dismantled. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->All the same, it is a wake up call, and Maran’s hands off attitude will not pay. While regulation does not appear the answer, unless it is privately managed, the government has to show concern, and make pronouncements that would boost sagging confidences abroad. It is hard not to compare, but Arun Shourie in Maran’s place would not have been so complacent. This is shameful.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> After nearly twenty years, we are being told to swallow the lie that no kickbacks were paid in the Bofors deal. The last poll fought on a corruption plank was in 1989, and it elected India’s worst prime minister, V.P.Singh. So revolted did his middle class supporters become by his Mandal politics that they voted in the Congress regime of P.V.Narasimha Rao, and turned their faces to its corruption<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->