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.