Controversy is over

Fortunately for India, the out-sourcing controversy seems to have quietened

down. Which means that it only reinforces the widespread belief that the

controversy was basically there because of the US Presi-dential elections. And

it was fueled by John Kerry, the Democrat candidate challenging George Bush. By

raking up the issue of loss of jobs, which Kerry said was bound to happen

because of outsourcing to India, he wanted to create a scare amongst the voters.

But they refused to take the bait and defeated him at the hustings.

So, what does it mean for India? For us it means a huge opportunity with

plenty of spin offs. This opportunity is not only earning a lot of valuable

foreign exchange for the country, but more importantly, is generating a lot of

employment as this is a purely people-intensive business. In fact, according to

one research report, the revenue from this sector can increase to some $ 18

billion by 2008 and in addition has the potential to provide employment to more

than a million people.

This means that outsourcing is a strategic and imperative fit for India. No

wonder, the central government as well as the state governments have recognized

this potential and almost all are offering incentives and infrastructure for

setting up these services.

However, there are some experts who are not very happy with this development.

They call these services as low grade jobs which India should not encourage. But

they fail to understand one simple fact that as there are millions of unemployed

people in India-employment generation has to be the prime consideration. And,

this is exactly what outsourcing services can do.

The entire spectrum of outsourcing 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.

So, it is extremely important that the industry works closely with the

government to ensure that India becomes the prime destination for these

services. In fact, the central government and industry needs to effectively

market India as the prime destination by highlighting our advantages-English

speaking and plenty of manpower. If they work closely together, India would only

benefit.