The outsource superpower

Judging by the amount of controversy going on all across the western

countries, espe-cially the US, India has well and truly arrived on the world

stage. Due to the increasing number of human jobs being shipped across to our

shores, a lot of heat is being generated. So much so that it has become a hot

issue in the forthcoming Presidential election campaign in the US.

Other countries are not far behind. In England also this matter is generating

a lot of debate and various political parties are trying there best to score

some brownie points by asserting there opposition to jobs outsourcing to India.

And as far as India is concerned, this is certainly a win-win situation. In

one throw, we are able to kill not two but three stones.

Undoubtedly, the whole ITES is a God-sent opportunity for India. In one

stroke, it not only promises to earn a lot of valuable foreign exchange–according

to a NASSCOM-Mckinsey report, the revenue from this can increase to around $ 18

billion by 2008–for the country, but more importantly, has the potential to

generate a lot of employment as this is a purely people-intensive business–another

report says that it has the potential to provide employment to more than 1.1

million people. On top of that, India gets to be on the center stage after

trying hard all these years to be taken seriously in the world economic affairs.

Which only means that ITES is 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. And the best part

is that the setting up of some of these services are not capital intensive and

are more entrepreneur driven.

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.

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. If not for

anything else, precisely for this reason the government needs to go all out to

promote the same.