Mumbai: Setting up of rural BPOs is no longer being perceived as just corporate social responsibility. These are viable businesses. Till a few months back, 20-year-old Srinivas Mangipudi slogged daily as a farm labourer in a remote village in Karnataka. All he got in return was a pittance. His fortunes turned around when a business process outsourcing (BPO) centre opened up a few kilometres from his village. Having dropped out after 12th standard, he applied for a job and got it. Now, after completing his training, he not only gets a salary of over Rs 4,000 per month but also benefits like provident fund and health insurance.
Mangipudi is simply one among the many educated village youth to join the many BPOs that are being set up in villages of India. Popularly known as rural BPOs, they include players like RuralShores, Tata Business Support Services (earlier know as Serwizsol), DesiCrew Solutions and Comat Technologies. Some of the organisations that get services from such centres include HDFC Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Axis and many telecom players.
Data are hard to come by but rough estimates peg the total number of rural BPOs in India in a few hundreds. Most of these centres provide services like data entry, email responses, document checks, data and bill processing.
DesiCrew, for instance, started as an incubatee of IIT-Chennai’s Rural Technology Business Incubator and spun out as a commercial entity in 2007. Today, it employs around 200 people across four centres. The company’s current portfolio holds five clients with annuity contracts, 30 clients in all, and over 50 completed projects.
“Rural BPO needs a conducive environment to grow. The government’s role is obviously that of a facilitator, but considering the nascent stage at which the concept is in, there is a case for creative utilisation of the strengths of the government. There are a number of areas where the governments could benefit by adopting rural BPO models — governance, accountability and efficiency, cost savings are examples,” says Manivannan J K, president and chief operating officer, DesiCrew Solutions. The firm will soon open one centre each at Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.
Realising the employment opportunity that rural BPOs can offer, some state governments, too, have started providing incentives.
The initiative provided by the Karnataka government, for instance, has led to the setting up of 16 rural BPOs in the state. In addition the recent advertisement for establishing rural BPOs saw another 14 applications for setting up BPOs. “We provide infrastructure and financial assistance as incentives. For training, we provide Rs 10,000 per candidate to the entrepreneur who plans to set up the centre. Besides they get 50 per cent reduction on internet charges among others. We have approached the central government to adopt this model for a national policy on rural BPO,” says Ashok Kumar Manoli, principal secretary to Government, Department of Information Technology, Biotechnology and Science & Technology, Karnataka.
After Karnataka, it is now the Tamil Nadu government, which is planning to announce a policy for setting up rural BPOs. The reason lies in numbers. A centre of about 50-75 seats can be set up to cater to the available labour pool for every 20 villages. This will create about four million rural employment on an average wage of over Rs 4,000 per month for the entire year and benefit about 20 million rural people directly. One can compare this to NREGS, which has created an average 45 days of employment at Rs 80/day in the last five years for 20 million households. Only 4 million households have managed the mandatory 100 days.
Murali Vullaganti, CEO of RuralShores, however, believes that government incentives should focus on the operation of these centres“I think just providing incentives is not good enough