Ever had the opportunity to speak to a customer care executive with Tata Sky? Instead of the usual accented English, you'd be surprised to hear chaste Hindi in case you are calling from a city that up north or to the west of the country.

Welcome to the world of regional language call centers. Though Tata Sky is no pathbreaker, it is one of the many companies that are looking to tap the domestic market through the tele-marketing route where they speak to the consumer in the language of her choice.

Call centres in Mumbai are handling a variety of languages from Marathi to Gujarati and even Konkani while those in the south tackle the four regional languages of Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. And the biggest gainers from this trend are the 20-something graduates who speak their mother tongue very fluently while managing English at a basic level.

Such centres operating out of smaller towns means a twin advantage to the client in terms of the cost of operations as well as turnaround. Employees like Varsha Srikanth at a call centre in Coimbatore would not dream of quitting a job that pays her Rs.8500 a month. "I am continuing my studies and making some cash that eases the burden on my parents," she says.

While Varsha perceives the job as a step in her ladder of success, others like Poongudi are thankful that the company offered a job to her, given the fact that she had graduated from University with a totally Tamil oriented curriculum. "I can't hope to find a white collar job like this anywhere but in government," she says.

What's more, some of these companies, operating out of small offices with basic facilities like telephone lines and broadband internet, offer sops to their staff by training them in spoken English and other skills that could enhance their careers.

The major clients for Indian language call centers include telecom, financial services like insurance, banking and stock trade, retail industry etc. A leading daily published a report quoting an operations head of a leading BPO who pointed out that telecom companies were adding millions of subscribers annually and needed people proficient in local languages to deal with them.

With customers from semi-urban and rural areas preferring to speak their local language, the call centers report that they find more acceptance when the dialogue with the customer is in the language of their choice.
Industry experts believe that the domestic BPO market has more than 50 small and big players with a market size in excess of 1.5 billion dollars.

More than five lakh people could be employed in this segment of the industry which is expected to grow in tandem with the growth in the industries that it services. "We expect a 50% annual growth rate in this segment," says the report published by DNA newspaper quoting Ms. Radhika Balasubramaniam, the chief operating officer of Intelenet Global Services.

With such growth on the anvil, it seems like happy days ahead for the non-English speaking call center executive. What's more, these employers only expect the candidate to possess a basic education of upto plus-2 levels, a working knowledge of English, basic data entry skills and ability to converse in the local language.