Millennium opportunity

Undoubtedly, IT-enabled services is the opportunity of the millennium for India. In one stroke, it not only promises to earn a lot of valuable foreign exchange for the country, but more importantly, has the potential to generate a lot of employment as this is a purely people-intensive business.

Which only means that IT enabled services are a strategic and imperative fit for India. Recognizing this potential, almost all the state governments are offering incentives and infrastructure for setting up these services. On its part, the central government has provided income tax exemption to profits from exports of some of these services.

And the best part is that the setting up of some of these services are not capital intensive and are more of entrepreneur driven. It is estimated that roughly 45,000 people are currently employed in IT enabled services generating revenues close to Rs 2,500 crore. In fact, according to a NASSCOM-McKinsey report, the revenue from this can increase to some $ 18 billion by 2008 and in addition has the potential to provide employment to more than 1.1 million people.

The entire spectrum of IT enabled services has many segments including call centers, medical transcription, back office operations, insurance claims processing, etc. In addition, there are a number of other emerging segments like data entry, data processing, database services, data digitization, GIS etc.

Out of all these different segments perhaps the best suited to India is the concept of call centers which are used by most of the large services and manufacturing organizations to provide customer information and services. They are used for responding to customer queries, telemarketing, customer surveys etc. As it is a manpower intensive business, the potential for generating employment in a country like India is enormous.

Although there are a number of experts who call the entire gamut of IT-enabled services as a low-grade job which India should not encourage. But the fact of the matter is that as India is a highly populated country--where millions of people are unemployed--employment generation has to be the prime consideration. And, this is exactly what IT enabled services can do.


For that to happen, the industry needs to work closely with the government to ensure that India becomes the prime destination for these services. A focussed awareness and understanding of IT enabled services business and its segments need to be created. In addition, the infrastructure requirements for this needs to be tackled on a war footing.