Especially if there is no business or work coming to these centres. There are so many IT projects that the government is coming out with. It can easily give some of the work to such centres,” he adds.
RuralShores is among the few that has been able to convince customers about being served from a rural BPO set-up. The company at present has six centres across India with 100 employees per centre. It has three centres in Karnataka and one each in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat. It plans to set up three more in Rajasthan, Bihar and UP by the end of this year. Each of these villages have a population in the range of 10,000-15,000.
“Our aim is to have 400 centres by 2017,” says Vullaganti. RuralShores runs its centre on a franchisee model, wherein entrepreneur from each district run these centres.
While rural BPOs can help in lowering real-estate costs and help in getting cheaper labour for low-end outsourced work, setting up centres in the remote villages of India is not an easy task. Raju Bhatnagar, vice-president BPO and Government Relations, Nasscom and who earlier headed SerWizsol (a rural BPO) feels that rural BPOs have certainly moved away from being a corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity to a serious business model. “It certainly is no more a novelty. But the model is very different. You cannot have a 500-1,500 seater. Each centre in a rural BPO will have around 100-150 people. The Indian BPO sector took eight-10 years to get high-end work. Rural BPOs, too, will take sometime to change the mindset.”
Moreover, the time taken for training is around six-seven months, and sending mid-managers to these centres is a task. Training includes even a simple task like opening a bank account. “Skill-training is a continuous process. Besides you have to be very choosy when it comes to sending-manager level personnel’s to such centres. These people will drive the growth and culture of that centre. If in anyway these guys give a wrong impression, it become difficult to operate,” opines Milind Godbole, President APAC at Aditya Birla Minacs.
Aditya Birla Mincas, under its initiative of ‘Connect India’, plans to tap the potential of rural India. Under the hub-and-spoke model the company will have hub with headcount in the range of 800-1,000 will handle 20-25 per cent of volume. The rest will be distributed among the spoke, which would have capacity of 100 seats or slightly more. He adds: “We will go live at two centres. The Kolkata centre with 400 employees and the Ranchi centre with 100 people have recently gone live.”
Manivannan of DesiCrew concludes, “the next 12-18 months are crucial in the evolution of rural BPOs where a lot of large companies are in the process of committing their best resources to derive value out of rural BPO models”.

Source: Business Standard