A BPO employee was gang raped by 10 men and she was found unconscious near a hillock in Pune. Conflicting stories are doing the rounds regarding the circumstances of rape. One indicates that she might have been raped in her room and another points to the company pickup cab driver who called her out and incidentally drove her to an isolated place where she was raped by him and his cronies.

Another incident that reveals how unsafe single working women are in India. After the Scarlet Keeling case there was a British journalist who lodged a similar complaint and the accused received instant bail. These incidents have become a regular feature of ‘Shining India”.

Men seem to be viewing women only as an object of sexual gratification and nothing more. The male dominated society of India seems to be incapable of accepting working women whom they see as easy prey and consider “open” in their views of sex.

BANGALORE, India (AFP) — Several Indian information-technology companies are ordering cans of pepper spray for their female call centre employees to use against possible attackers, a newspaper reported Tuesday.

The move follows the rape-murder last month of a 22-year-old call centre employee in the western city of Pune by a company driver, leading to fears of safety in an industry that employs 1.6 million people.

A similar incident took place in this southern Indian city, the hub of the 50 billion dollar IT industry, in December 2005.

“Several companies have approached us asking us to deliver the product,” the Bangalore Mirror quoted Rana Singh, an executive at a company that makes a self-defence pepper spray, as saying.

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