BW: Outsourcing Heads To the Outskirts
This is what really makes a difference to a wider India. So far, growth has been confined to a few cities and causing chaos in terms of infrastructure. Its quite natural extension of oursourcing to go to rural areas, any corner of the world infact. The growth must go to Rural areas, to bring IT to everyone in India. And this is a big and hard step forward, but worth every penny and second spent.
Location is not important for most functions of any IT work, and doesn't make sense to do it only in a city. I believe we have talent every where, and with littel tuning and training, we can leverage vast resources of Rural India.
If MNCs move to India for cost advantage, why not move it further to Rural India where the Cost Advantage becomes a much bigger advantage. Not just that, it would bring entire country on to a similar level of growth and expowerment. I do not think at this point, there is any issue of Quality of work that can be done in Rural areas. Its as good as what can be done in Bangalore or Hyderabad. Its the same people that moved from Rural India to cities for jobs.
The village of Ethakota in India's Andhra Pradesh state hardly looks like a place that has been transformed by the Information Revolution. To get there, you take a 10-hour train ride from Hyderabad, the nearest big city, then drive an hour on narrow roads past rice paddies, coconut groves, and ponds teeming with prawns and crabs. The village itself is a collection of simple brick houses and thatch-roof huts. Yet in a tidy office shaded by 30-foot-tall palms, 50 young people sit at PCs connected to the Internet via a long-distance radio link, doing business process outsourcing (BPO) tasks such as checking expense account receipts for Indian corporations and arranging job interviews for applicants in distant cities.
They're working for GramIT, a 16-month-old nonprofit that's seeking to transplant India's tech services boom to some of the country's 600,000 villages
Comments