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Grow With Services

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DQW Bureau
New Update





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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.

This 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 settings up of some of

these services are not capital intensive and are more of the 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 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.

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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 requirement

for this needs to be tackled on a war footing.

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