Rahul Bedi in New Delhi explains how India has embraced outsourcing, ranging from medical imaging diagnosis to requests for Catholic Church Masses
BY MOVING its service and support functions to Aviva’s operation in Bangalore by 2011, Ireland’s largest insurer Hibernian is tapping into India’s mushrooming business processing outsourcing (BPO) centres catering to overseas banks, credit card companies and financial institutions.
Offering possibly the world’s largest pool of software programmers, the 1,500-odd BPOs or call centres capitalise on the time difference between North America and Europe to maintain client information systems cheaply.
Using high-speed data links these centres located mainly at Bangalore, Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and nearby Pune in the west, Madras and Hyderabad in the south, and the federal capital New Delhi, also fix computer “glitches” and “bugs” for financial service companies.
About two million graduates man hundreds of these call centres and “cyber” shops, producing programmes for retail banks, investment and insurance corporations and three-dimensional imaging for medical diagnosis.
Private contractors also write up case reports for overseas lawyers, doctors and consultants.
According to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, or Nasscom, the trade body of technology companies operating in India, the country’s information technology (IT) industry is projected to earn a revenue of €53 billion in the financial year 2007-08 that ended in March. And in 2008-09 it is projected to grow by about 33 per cent, with new businesses in Europe offsetting the slowdown in the US economy.
The US, with a 61 per cent share in India’s software industry, remains its largest customer but since 2004 exports to Europe have grown steadily. According to Nasscom, the UK accounts for 18 per cent of India’s software services and continental Europe, including Ireland, 12 per cent.
“We are expanding our base and this shows in the diversification of industry from English-speaking countries to Europe and other nations,” said Nasscom head Som Mittal.
Most call centres hire youngsters in their late teens or early 20s, paying them a monthly wage of Rs12,000 – Rs15,000 (€179 – €223), several times the national average. Promotions have been rapid; within two years many doubled their earnings.
Working in air-conditioned offices was an added pre-requisite in a country where such luxury was rare. But more recently there has been mounting concern in IT circles whether Indian companies would continue to find enough “high calibre” recruits to satisfy the demand for quality call centres, which is expected to climb exponentially by 2010.
Many personnel have also been quitting as the work was tediously repetitive and the schedule gruelling. “The burn-out rate is high,” a centre manager in Delhi said.
The majority of call centre personnel work through the night – given the time differences with the West – and end up suffering from sleep deprivation and related problems such as high blood pressure and disorientation.
Because the work was persistently similar – handling calls for telephone numbers, rail and air inquires and bookings, conducting telesales campaigns and market surveys besides providing data on credit cards and bank accounts – it has been common for workers to quit within two years of starting.
Operators catering to UK customers were given accent training to enable the average Briton calling to understand them.
And since most had never been to the UK, they also underwent a crash course in British culture.
“They like hitting the pubs, love horse racing, football and fish and chips,” many were told during training sessions.
The outsourcing shift eastwards, however, has been controversial in the UK where British unions were battling to stop jobs leaving the country and similarly in the US where it features periodically in policy reviews and during presidential election campaigns.
Domestically, the outsourcing issue has become so sensitive that Indian companies keep the identities of their overseas clients a closely guarded secret. All call centres also claim to strictly enforce security among employees to prevent any leakage of information.
Employees were monitored constantly on closed-circuit television and permitted to carry neither paper nor mobile telephones, nor bags onto the operations floor. They were also subjected to periodic random body searches.
Outsourcing, however, has not been limited to financial and related services but also prayers to Indian clergymen following a paucity of Roman Catholic priests in the West, especially in North America and Europe.
These benedictions, known as “holy Mass intentions” or “dollar Masses”, take place mostly in southern Kerala state where a majority of India’s Catholic population of about 25 million lives.
Church officials say they received requests for special remembrance services for deceased relatives, prayers for newborns and newly-weds or for peace for the soul of a deceased relative, and conducted them mostly in the local language, Malayalam. A few are said in English.
Hundreds of requests for special prayers are made each month to various dioceses across Kerala either directly through the Vatican, local bishops or other religious bodies, but rarely ever to the priests themselves.
Prayer requests have also started arriving via e-mail, a sign of increasing dependency on information technology even in the ecclesiastical realm. They also come with a $5 (€3.2) offering or more than five times what it cost the locals for the same prayer, greatly supplementing India’s outsourcing earnings.
