Free Republic

It’s an industry that’s getting the cash registers ringing and presenting India as the back office headquarters of the world. It’s also the industry that mostly employs jumpity post-adolescents who, a decade ago, would have either been part of the odd market survey team trying to check how much consumption interest there is in a to-be-launched lipstick, or would have been whiling away their time until they got married or a job, whichever came hurtling first. So it’s not Reliance or Infosys, but it’s a job that we apparently do well and, believe it or not, it’s work that a...

BANGALORE: From Europe and North America, India's offshore workers call center operators, data entry clerks and telemarketers may seem like the sweatshop laborers of the information age, toiling long hours for meager pay. But an international alliance of unions that wants to organize them is finding a very different reality in India: many think of themselves as members of a relatively well-paid, respected professional elite in no need of a union's protection. "I know these young people have a negative image about unions," says Narayan Ram Hegde of Union Network International, a global alliance of 900 unions. But "these professionals...

We've heard reports that business process outsourcing work in India can be a dead-end job replete with long hours and unpaid overtime. But it seems such workplace woes are being offset to some degree with moments of sexual healing. A story in the India press today reports that BPO workers are smooching and more in office settings, which have transformed into personal spaces in addition to professional domains. "From making friends to cultivating relationships, BPO units are slowly becoming hubs where inter-personal bonding takes place," the story in The Economic Times says. "And it comes as little surprise that many...

Not the great rollback, but BPOs losing big business With companies across the world spending more and more of their IT budgets towards engineering and automation processes, Indian BPOs are feeling the heat. A few months ago, Daksh eServices lost some of the business from Sprint Corp after Big Blue (incidentally, Daksh’s parent company) automated the processes for the long distance major doing away with the need to outsource them to India. Raman Roy, CEO, Wipro Spectramind, admits that there has been some reversal in the BPO space. “But that is happening because of two reasons: in the low-end of...

BANGALORE: Manpower shortage in India's high potential, high-growth ITES-BPO industry by 2009 is estimated to be 2.62 lakh people, officials said today. ITES-BPO (Information technology enabled services-business process outsourcing) employee base has grown at a compounded annual growth rate of 52.6 per cent, from 42,000 in 2001-02 to 3,48,000 in 2004-05, according to NASSCOM estimates. According to NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service companies), ITES-BPO exports recorded revenues of $5.2 billion in 2004-05, a growth of 44.5 per cent. The industry body has forecast these exports to grow at 41 per cent to reach USD 7.3 billion in the...

BOMBAY (Reuters) - Indian police have arrested 16 people in an investigation into the fraudulent transfer of more than $400,000 from Citibank customer accounts in the United States to bogus accounts in India, officials said on Thursday. Investigators said employees of a business process outsourcing company (BPO) persuaded Citibank customers to disclose information that would make their accounts accessible. "During our investigations, we found that the BPO company's employees sweet talked the customers to give them their PIN (personal identification numbers)," Sanjay Jadhav, assistant commissioner of police of the crime branch in the western Indian city of Pune, told Reuters....

20th August, 2020 was only a month away. And Jay Palvayantewsky was all tensed up by the mere thought of it, because it was on that fateful day his current job assignment was getting over. Neither he nor his boss knew if the global behemoth Infosys would renew their project or if they had to pack their bags and return to the good old USA. Life sucked when you were just one of the crores of foreigners in India on a temporary H1-B visa where your every move was dictated by the capricious and ever-changing Indian immigration laws. There was...

PUNE: At 22, Shantanu Arakere, an M.Com just out of Maharashtra Mitra Mandal College, had no idea where his life was going. He wanted to do an MBA, but did not get admission into a college he wanted. "Staying at home for one year was getting to me, I desperately wanted a job." He was searching for jobs related to his academic background — but every interview ended in disappointment. Finally, frustrated, he decided to give BPOs a try. And for the first time, he got a call within two days of the interview. He joined WNS, a leading BPO...

NEW DELHI : India is expected to tell US trade representative Robert Zoellick that restrictions being put up in the BPO market, which has always been open, do not auger well for resumption of the WTO talks. Zoellick has toured Japan , China , South-East Asia and will visit key African countries after his India trip. This is in follow-up to his January 12 letter to all 146 WTO member-countries, urging a quick resumption of the talks to meet the deadline for reaching a new deal at the end of the year. "2004 should not be a lost year," Zoellick...

New Delhi, Feb. 5. (UNI): Terming the legislation passed by the Senate banning business process outsourcing (BPO) in Government contracts as narrow in scope, the United States today said the measure was not particularly focussed on India and called for international trade that benefits both the US and the partnering countries. "Employment is a sensitive issue. It needs to be clear that international trade is a two-way street. There is a feeling in the United States that while the country's markets are extraordinarily open, those of other countries are not so much open," US Deputy Assistant Secretary David A Gross...