Data theft makes IT firm quit India

New Delhi: After registering a case against an employee who had allegedly stolen data, the Gurgaon-based IT firm Acme Telepower Management waited for something to happen. A week later they have decided to stop operating out of India and move to Australia.

It seems like this is the beginning of a domino effect, even as India's antiquated police force tries to deal with new age crime like data theft.

Acme Telepower is claiming a national loss of Rs 750 crore. They are saying it's all because an ex-employee named Sachidanand Patnaik who allegedly stole research and handed it over to his new employer - a competitor in the power industry solutions space.

On Thursday, the board of Acme met after a Gurgaon Sessions court granted bail to Patnaik and decided it was time to pack their bags.

"We are disappointed in the system. Patents and research are not protected, so we are not sure if the law will be able to protect us,” GM Marketing, Acme, Sandeep Kashyap said.

Acme employs around 1,100 people, who will be affected by the firm’s move to Australia that will happen over the next eight months.

Most of the 70 people in the Research and Development section will be the first to move. For the rest, the future is unclear.

According to Acme, only a small manufacturing operation will remain in India, but they say they will take care of their employees and that their reason for leaving is simple.

"The fact that the main accused has got bail and the others got a clean chit has disappointed us completely,” Kashyap said.

However, the lawyer for Sachidanand Patnaik says they are giving up too soon and that this trend could have dangerous repercussions.

"If the reason they are leaving India is because the main accused has got bail, then it is contempt of court,” Patnaik's lawyer, Vakul Sharma said.

When people lost faith in the system in the past, there was little they could, outside of rallying against everything wrong with the world.

However, today people have a choice. They can simply move on. But the question remains - will the system respond?

The Indian BPO industry has been hit by some serious fraud charges in recent years.

Global deals that run into billions, employers trying to squeeze maximum profit in a cut-throat market, hiring and firing hundreds and thousands of new empolyees every year - the growth in India's BPO industry has been fast and furious.

So have been accidents.

The Pune scam was the first among the many BPO frauds that made international headlines

In April 2005, five employees of MsourcE in Pune were arrested for allegedly pulling off a fraud worth nearly 2.5 crore rupees from the Citibank accounts of four New York-based account holders.

In June 2005, the British tabloid Sun, in a sting operation, purchased the bank account details of 1,000 Britons from Karan Bahree, an employee of Gurgaon-based BPO company Infinity E-Search.

The latest data theft hit India's IT capital Bangalore. In June 2006, Nadeem Kashmiri, an employee at HSBC's call center in Bangalore, sold the customer credit card information to a group of scamsters who used the information to siphon off nearly Rs 1.8 crore from bank accounts of UK-based customers.

While these incidents may be few and far between, they challenge the claims of the BPO industry that it follows strict international guidelines in India.

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