Nasscom chairman Ganesh Natarajan has pitched for Jaipur as the next generation BPO destination in India along with several other smaller cities and believes that outsourcing majors should quickly look beyond metros to sustain growth.

Speaking to delegates at a function in the Pink City to prote it as a premier BPO destination, Natarajan said “Jaipur can be uniquely positioned as an alternative location for NCR on account of its proximity to Delhi. The availability of good analytical skills make Jaipur an attractive destination for non-voice related services and processes."

It may be recalled that a joint study by Nasscom and AT Kearney had placed Jaipur as one of the cities that could become a hub for IT-BPO activities. The other cities include Lucknow, Kochi, Madurai, Mangalore, Nagpur, Thiruvananthapuram, Tiruchirappalli, Vadodara and Visakhapatnam.

The study had also noted the opportunities that existed in cities like Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Coimbatore and Indore, besides Jaipur and the other smaller cities mentioned above. For the next tier, the study had listed out Aurangabad, Bhopal, Goa, Gwalior and Hubli-Dharwad

Dr. Natarajan said that the abundant Hindi-speaking skills the Rajasthan could be leveraged fruitfully for domestic BPO voice operations. “Jaipur is like what Pune was in 2001 when it started with three IT companies. Now two lakh people are employed in IT-BPO in Pune and its annual exports amount to two billion US dollars,” he said.