BPO is inadvertently the hottest thing that ever
happened to the Indian economy. It’s even hotter than
The Y2K that created hundreds of thousands of jobs
especially for software engineers. BPO have opened the
doors widely to whoever can speak English or imitate
English in a ’Propah’ accent. The popularity of BPO
could be gauzed from the fact that I have myself sat
through more than five presentations on BPO during my
MBA.
BPO started out in India with medical transcription
where one needed only to understand the American and
British English accent and not even talk it. Slightly
higher end BPO followed in the form of call centers
wherein one was needed to be able to talk English in
the propah English or American accent.
Even higher end
jobs followed in the form of payroll processing, HR
functions to legal advices and even drafting for
architecture firms abroad and MBA and CAs crunching
Financial Data’s for Equity research firms, data
analysis and what not. The last presentation I
attended had a brief mention of a Mumbai based BPO
outfit that analyzes high-end data from petroleum
refinery that employs only PhDs.
Even Surgery and
radiology are BPOed. But highly skilled or unskilled,
the fact remains that all these jobs are meant for the
cheaper labour. And India being a developing country
has cheap labour in abundance.
But the Question is, how long can India sustain this
labour-cost advantage? The same jobs that this
advantage have created has made the living standards
in India visibly higher than it use to be a few years
back which can seen from the growing number of
multiplexes, shopping malls and MNC fast food chains.
The BPO as an industry have contributed immensely to
the Indian economy and will continue to do so for some
years to come. Added to this we are seeing significant
developments in other sectors of the economy as well.
IT sector as a whole in on an ever growing growth
path. Majors IT MNCs continue to expand their existing
Indian operations and those which didn’t exists before
are entering in hordes.
The infrastructure will
significantly improve once the golden quadrilateral in
completed. And all these will drive the Indian economy
on a faster growth path. In a developed India, will
the labour-cost advantage remain? With more
development,.living cost will increase… the current
inflation could as well be a manifestation of all
this.
In such a scenario, Lesser-developed countries like
Vietnam and perpetually cheap labour country like
China will continue to offer cheaper costs and if
India has one one of the world’s largest English
speaking population…China is also learning ENGLISH so
is Vietnam and speaking english is not rocket
science..
And the Chinese could have learnt it even if
it were rocket science. Just as India is moving up the
value chain in the Outsourcing game so are the Chinese
and the vietnamese. And they are doing it very
effectively. So saying that the Chinese and the
Vietnamese doesn’t pose a big threat to the Indian BPO
sector would be an understatement, or it could be like
whistling when you are walking down a dark road
consoling yourself there is no one out there.
Another problem in BPO is choosing it as a career
because of the limited growth it has to offer as a
career. People look to BPO not as a career but as a
transition job one takes up before moving on to
greener pastures or an MBA.
It is because BPO companies doesn’t offer much growth and it’s much a
monotonous job and as such its very difficult for one
to look at BPO as a long term career option. The heavy
toll that the 24/7 work culture of the BPO on the
health and psych of BPO executives has been another
major problem that have attracted much attention and
which have started to manifest in the form of the high
attrition rate of 30% + and growing, in the BPO
industry.
So, is BPO a really viable driver of the Indian
economy? Before putting a large chunk of our eggs in
the BPO basket, it would be only wiser to look for
other baskets as well.
* Anthony Tongbram, an MBA graduate from Symbiosis,Pune contributes to e-pao.net regularly.
He can be contacted at [email protected]
This article was webcasted on Oct 11th 2004
|