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.
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.