Urmila Maan, a 25 year old housewife from a village close to Pilani, Rajasthan begins her day at 5 am and attends to her usual household chores. By 8 am however, she is in pursuit of bigger dreams. Urmila works for SourcePilani – a rural business process outsourcing unit in Pilani servicing doctors in the US by delivering medical transcription work.

“SourcePilani has added a whole new dimension to my otherwise routine life”, says Urmila. “It has not only taught me specific skills related to my job but also enhanced my self-confidence. Today I enjoy a better social status in society and it feels very nice.”

Established in September 2007, SourcePilani employs about 55 rural graduates who work out of a 2,000 sq ft facility to provide back-end services to domestic and international clients. It was the brainchild of Dr L K Maheswari, Vice Chancellor of one of India’s premier engineering institutes, BITS Pilani who met up with some of his former students and pitched the idea to them.

“When Dr Maheshwari spoke to me about the concept of a rural BPO, I knew immediately that this was something worth pursuing,” says Manoj Vasudevan, CEO of SourcePilani and a BITS Pilani alumnus who quit his job with IBM to start the BPO.

From a socio-economic standpoint, this idea would have a large impact on society and Vasudevan used this to procure the seed capital of Rs 30 lakhs from the Goenka Group.
“We started out with a vision of bridging the digital divide in the region through a twin based approach – training (ICT & English) and employment (BPO) and an ambitious plan of triggering a rural transformation in the country,” says Vasudevan.

When you ask him about the strengths and weaknesses at that time he is quick to rattle out a long list of the latter. “Our only strength was cost effectiveness among BPO players since we were operating in a low cost environment,” says the 24 year old CEO. A rural BPO operation can provide services 30% cheaper than its urban counterpart with an almost zero attrition rate.

“Weaknesses, however, were numerous. We were a new player in the sector and convincing clients about our people, process and technology was a big challenge. There was a lot of market skepticism. Next, there were language barriers among the rural workforce that we needed to overcome in order to develop our human resources. There was also a deep social stigma that we needed to eliminate among the local people of Pilani against such a venture such as ours. We were in effect providing an alternative employment to rural people other than agriculture. Thus, the initial mindset had to be gradually molded and this was indeed the greatest weakness for us to start off with.”

To overcome some of these drawbacks, the company developed an innovative and customized foundation training program to train its rural workforce. The three month training program focused on building a foundation in ICT and English before putting employees through process specific BPO training. “We concentrated on all practical aspect of the English language training that include grammar, reading, writing, speaking, comprehending and listening. On the ICT front, the onus was to develop computer exposure and practical IT knowledge among the people,” says Vasudevan.

Within two months, Sourcepilani had bagged its first client in the form of the Rajasthan Government for providing database services. And then there was no looking back. The firm went on to enter into a tie up with Truworth Infotech, Rajasthan’s largest transcription house, to provide medical transcription services for international customersSourcePilani currently has 20 of its employees on this vertical and aims to scale up the medical transcription unit to 100 people soon

“We want to grow to 200 employees by next yearThe vision is to replicate this model across Rajasthan and set up rural BPO centers with 100 employees each, and one day take this across India,” says VasudevanThe company is also planning to launch a customized ICT and English training module for Government schools which it will undertake on a turnkey basis“The nature of the contracts we are looking at as of now will be in the nature of the BOOT model (Build, Own, Operate and Transfer),” he adds