Chennai:
My job has been Bangalored! is now passé.
The future is my job is Mettupalayamed / Neyvelied
/ Nellikuppamed or any other Indian village.
The
ultimate in business process outsourcing (BPO) is to
get the work done at rural areas. The Telecommunications
and Computer Networks (TeNet) group of Indian Institute
of Technology Madras has started that initiative in
three states.
The
TeNet group has converted around 20 rural internet kiosks
into BPO / ITES centres and generated around Rs80,000
income for the rural people last year. The services
offered are: administrative (data entry), engineering
(2D to 3D conversion, computer aided design -CAD) and
localisation (translation, Tamil typing, desk top publishing
and multimedia works).
With
encouraging results the group is ramping up its operations
fast. "This month we have increased the headcount
by 45 to 70," says Saloni Malhotra, project head,
Rural Business Process Outsourcing, IIT Madras.
Speaking
about the project background she adds, "There are
around 15,000 rural internet cafes and five years down
the line it is expected to go up to 1 lakh. We conducted
a study of visitors to the internet cafes run my group
company n-Logue Communications in rural Tamil Nadu.
Out of the total 47 per cent of the browsers are students,
12 per cent educated (graduates, plus two pass) but
unemployed and 9 per cent housewives. This made us wonder
whether these people could become BPO workers."
The
project office at IIT Madras will be the front-end of
the operations nad the interface point between the BPOs
and the world at large. It will procure the orders and
pass it on to the Chiraag internet cafes established
by n-Logue Communications. Based on the need the café
owner would recruit additional hands or involve his
own family members to complete the project. "The
training needed to execute the work is given by us,"
Malhotra says.
The
group has set up operations in three states and offers
services in four Indian languages - English, Tamil,
Marathi and Gujarati.
According
to her the team is now executing an educational project
for Confederation of Indian Industry called CII Shiksha.
"For an Indian subsidiary of a foreign engineering
company we are executing an engineering drawing and
conversion of 2D drawing to 3D drawing. I am not in
a position to tell the client name."
Targetting
domestic banks, insurers for data entry work and publishers
for translation and multimedia projects Malhotra says,
"Unlike in city-based BPOs, attrition is not an
issue for us as the work is done by housewives or the
educated rural youth." What is interesting
is the 30-40 per cent cost difference between a service
provider in the city and rural areas. Interestingly,
the BPO arm of a big software company is helping her
to standardise the operations.
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