In the process of writing the cover story on Why Bangalore hates the ITculture last week, I went looking for a variety of statistics. One of them was crime figures against IT professionals. That is, of instances in which IT people had become victims. Statistics are collected and collated for two key reasons--if demonstrably shoring up credibility of what you write is one reason, the other is to reassure yourself that you are not actually imagining the story. The crime statistics had reasonably convinced me about the envy or hate factor against IT professionals in the city and had given me the necessary degree of confidence to proceed with the cover idea.
Although Bangalore is called India's Silicon Valley, there is very little preparation on the administration's part to handle the city's special status. For example, I am not sure if there is a customised drill to follow in the event of a terrorist attack on a key IT installation. Forget an attack, is there a plan on hand if there is simply analert? We see it all the time when an IT company receives a bomb threat (one should only be grateful that there have been only hoax calls made so far). The sling-ID employees are herded on the pavement right outside the towering glass facades, while the bomb squad is searching the nook and corner of the building. How safe is it to stand outside the compound and keep working your cellphones when the building is said to be strapped with bombs? If not anything worse, shouldn't oneat least fear glass splinters?
Similarly, despite the many attacks on BPO/ITeS and IT professionals there is no separate or special category under which these crimes are recorded. Crime is a crime, why should it be registered under a special categoryyou may ask, but then how else will you sort, plan action and prevent thesecrimes? Pointed information will undoubtedly bring enormous clarity to the issue and offer a safer profile for the city. In ahi-tech capital, creating a software that documents such specifics shouldn't be a problem.
But, anyway, in the absence of such specific details, the city is lucky to have some earnest police officers. When I made a request for statistics of crime against IT people to Gopal Hosur, the city's joint commissioner (crime), he quickly saw meaning in building such an inventory and put his men on the job. Over three weeks, after carefully sifting FIRs lodged in various police stations of the city, the statistics that emerged, expectedly, told a very interesting story. Quite randomly we chose to look at crimes that had taken place since 2004 till present.
Take a look at figures for