India’s largest home finance company, HDFC has acquired 26% stake in Bangalore-based RuralShores Business Services, a rural BPO firm. RuralShores was established last year by a team of six technocrats with an aim to link up about 500 locations with a population of less than 20,000.

“We typically look at setting up 80-100 seater centres in towns with a population of 10,000-15,000 with a cluster of villages around it. The work timings are between 6 am to 10 pm in two shifts with each centre employing 150-200 people,” says Murali Vullaganti, CEO of RuralShores. The firm operates two such centres at Bagepalli and Ratnagiri near Vellore in Tamil Nadu where they operate along with the local schools.

RuralShores—with a promoter list that include former E&Y honcho V V Ranganathan, Mastek MD Sudhakar Ram, former MD of Xansa India Murali Vullaganti and G Srinivas of Dawn Consulting—confirmed HDFC’s entry as a significant minority investor saya a report in the Economic Times.

Rural BPOs are the new buzzword in the outsourcing story with firms like Xchanging, which acquired Cambridge Solutions, and Hinduja Global Solutions operating from semi-urban places like Shimoga in Karnataka and Durgapur in West Bengal.

HDFC Bank through a fully-owned arm had kicked-off captive operations at Tirupati last year, while Tata Chemicals came up with back-office centres at Barala in Uttar Pradesh and Mithapur in Gujarat.