Calcutta, July 27: When Bangalore sneezes, Calcutta catches a cold.

The news of Tanya Banerjee’s murder in Bangalore has sent shock waves through the Salt Lake Electronic Complex (Saltlec), the state’s IT hub, forcing companies to step up security measures and review recruitment policies.

“The incident is really shocking?. It points out that companies must adopt stringent and comprehensive measures to verify a candidate’s background in order to ensure that everything is above board,” said D.K. Chaudhuri, chief executive officer of Skytech Solutions, a software services company.

From installing closed-circuit television to banning mobile storage devices and installing GPRS systems in cars used by employees to hiring former army personnel as security in-charge, most of the companies have elaborate arrangements in place.

“But the Bangalore incident has given us a very loud wake-up call regarding security issues,” said Satadru Sinha, senior executive, administration, Cognizant Technology Solutions.

The immediate fallout of the incident is extra emphasis on reference checks.

The companies are also hiring investigative firms to verify candidates’ background and ensure that there are no anomalies or criminal track records.

The other issue the companies are closely looking at is pick-up and night-drop facilities for employees. Pick-up and night-drop are standard practices in the fledgling industry, in which work hours are different from other organisations.

At Saltlec, the question doing the rounds is whether making company transport mandatory can work as a deterrent against crime.

“We cannot force our employees to use our transport. Sometimes the boys and girls want to go home on their own. Even their parents prefer picking them up after work. Making night-drop mandatory by company vehicle is difficult to implement,” said the security head of a city-based call centre.

Arnab Jyoti Paul, a call centre executive with a telecom major, highlights the concern of employees.

“Even today, the code of conduct for car pick-ups and drops, which states that women have to be picked up last and dropped first, is not strictly followed. Security measures have been lax in spite of what has been happening.”

The companies, however, claim they are constantly trying to make their systems foolproof and give their employees a sense of security.

Though none of the BPO companies are willing to talk about it in open, the buzz from the tech town is that some companies are even planning to restructure rosters to ensure that women employees do not work late hours.