BANGALORE: The call centre cab drivers are responsible for 1,000 accidents in the tech city every year, according to the traffic experts.
Jumping the traffic signals, racing with another cab, rash driving and irresponsible behaviour are the common offences.
Over 25,000 drivers ply through Bangalore carrying 2.5 techies working for over 1,500 tech firms. At a given point of time over 6,000 cabs traverse the roads.
The IT companies woke up to the problems caused by their dare devil drivers after the Pratibha Murthy incident, where a 24-year-old Hewlett-Packard employee was raped and murdered in December 2005 by a cabbie.
Now, the companies are offering reiki and pranayama treatment apart from training them on the hard skills of driving.
The firms such as Infosys, Wipro, Hewlett-Packard, Mphasis, Seaton India, Globalsoft and Kshema Technologies have hired the traffic engineers and safety trainers (TEST), an organisation of 150 traffic engineers that has trained over 4,000 cabbies so far.
“We will soon begin training for Infosys and HP drivers soon. What we do is boost their morale because they have not learnt and realised the importance of being a driver. Under payment and harassment by the employers are also reasons for the rage. To bring down those problems we have introduced reiki and pranayama,” said the founder and chairman of TEST M N Sreehari.
The cabbies are coached on image building etiquette, time management, awareness about public security, after accident trauma care, awareness about traffic rules and defensive driving habits.
Meanwhile, the Bangalore traffic police have made an investment of Rs100 crore to set up a system to record and punish the offenders.
The police have set up video cameras at the important junctions of the city to record the offences caused by the drivers. “The call centre cabbies are mainly responsible for the night time accidents,” said additional commissioner of police (Traffic & Security) K C Ramamurthy.
The traffic police will also be creating a database of the offenders. “Severe punishment will be given for persons causing the offence more than once. This way we will be installing fear element into the drivers to keep check on their errant driving,” he said.
