Kerala, on the other hand, is going for a ‘hub and spoke’ model as a part of which the government aims to set up about 100 rural BPOs at panchayat and district level in all the 14 districts of the state, in the next three years. Under a scheme known as ‘Techno Lodge’, the state-owned Kerala State IT Infrastructure Limited is setting up facilities in the rural areas which are being given on lease to private parties. The government is also providing lands to interested private parties to establish offices and give it on lease to companies intending to set up low cost BPO centres. The first two of the rural BPOs under this scheme have been set up in Perinad and Kadakkal villages of Kerala’s Kollam district, and would be officially inaugurated in November this year, Ajay Kumar, IT secretary, government of Kerala said.

“We expect that when complete, our low cost BPO scheme will generate employment opportunities for about 10,000 people. We intend to have such BPOs at the panchayat and taluk level in every district which will be headed by the district collectors,” Kumar added.

Industry sources say other than creating employment opportunities for rural youths, the rural BPO initiatives would also encourage bigger players to move a chunk of their outsourcing works to these lows cost operations, either to their own centres or to their partners. “Even though we don’t want to set up rural BPOs, we are interested to work with companies who have a base in rural areas in Karnataka. We can bring them business continuity,” said Amitabh Chaudhry, CEO of Infosys BPO.

Says Sabyasachi Satpathy, Partner at Tholons Advisory, “Rural BPO can provide an alternate business model for the opening up of the domestic BPO opportunities. By leveraging the low operations and people cost as well as significantly lower employee attrition, Indian service providers can significantly reduce cost by moving non-complex support operations from large cities to their rural operations.”

Source: Business Standard