Monday, April 11, 2005

India's outsourcing business might be in trouble

Rebecca at Offshoring Digest has a troubling post about the prospects for India's BPO companies.

We've seen alarm bells before -- concerns were raised early on about whether employees at India's call centers are as good as those at European or American centers. And for awhile, there was a concern that the political backlash against Offshore Outsourcing in American politics would lead Congress to pass laws restricting it. Neither of those issues have fully gone away, but they haven't succeeded in slowing the momentum in favor of Outsourcing.

But this is the first study I've seen that suggests that the trend may have peaked. The study also has sobering statistics on India's continuing problems with unemployment, in a number of different sectors of the economy.

Emphasis on "MIGHT"; I don't think anyone really knows for sure what the next phase of things is going to be in the Indian economy.

UPDATE: According to Rediff, four employees at a call center in Pune have been arrested for pilfering $350,000 USD from Citibank customers.

2 Comments:

Prashant Kothari said...

Call centers are a tiny fraction of the work being outsourced to India -- so let's not get the alarm bells out yet.

The long-term trend (for the rest of this decade) is positive but India's offshore outsourcing growth will face some bumps (customer service, debt collection and data security, among them) -- not all smooth sailing. The protectionist fears are way overblown -- making a mountain out of a molehill.

10:17 AM  
bookkeeping said...

If it happens in US there is hardly a blip and if it happens in the India the press makes a fuss out of it. Of course that is what the press is designed to do, create news to that people read so that they can sell their ads and make revenue. That is their business.

There are bound to be a bad apple or two regardless of the country the work is done at. As long as the companies police themselves this issue should blow over.

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5:01 PM  

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