The "call center" to new BPO: India strengthens its services

New Delhi, 12 may. - The green shoots in the global economy have brought better prospects for call centers and Indian companies outsourcing business (BPO), seeking to grow by over 15 per cent by 2020.
Sector companies were able to take root in the country at the end of the last decade, benefiting from the absence of regulations, and only this year its exports fell below double digits (+6 percent), due to international crisis.
The situation is complicated a priori: the market depends largely on the West, especially America, and the sector is facing increases in costs, lack of qualified professionals and competition from other emerging countries like the Philippines.
But in its latest report said the industry association, Nasscom, 2010 has seen the "reactivation" of industry and business growth will be between 15 and 18 percent on average annually until 2020.
And if he responds to these challenges, said Nasscom, the industry will reach 225,000 million dollars in exports in 2020 compared to 50,000 million today.
"I think the industry growth will continue at this pace long," he said in an interview with Efe Pramod Bhasin, president of the largest BPO in India, Genpact.
"Companies continue to look to us to find the effectiveness and productivity. Protect jobs in the U.S. will not solve anything, "he added in his office in the city of Gurgaon, one of the core services in India.
In the West has caught the idea of 's call centers "as areas where Indian workers to mimic the paltry salary of U.S. English accent to provide low cost services to their customers, settled thousands of miles away.
And although most companies keep this profile, the growth has allowed the birth of true multinationals that have diversified their business and are already present on several continents.
Including Latin America: to serve the U.S. Hispanic customers, the very Genpact has branches in Mexico and Guatemala and will be installed in Colombia, while its main competitor, the bombaití WNS, has one of its business centers in Costa Rica .
According to Bhasin, the Indian software industry and services benefiting from demographic change in the West - "the older, more people need care" - as well as the talent available in India and, for companies like yours elsewhere the world.
Gurgaon, headquarters of his company, was almost a village near the capital of India until 1997 Bhasin Americans convinced General Electric to delocalise business in the U.S. and settle in the town India.
Today, tens multinationals are stacked on both sides of the roads into Gurgaon, while companies complain of poor or no public facilities such as public transport or lack of reliable electricity supply.
Gurgaon companies maintain their own shuttle vans, SUVs or joining each day to thousands of young people with their jobs traveling back and forth, and expensive electrical generators to the frequent blackouts.
The problems extend to other important cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad in the south, but this has not stopped the industry to become the spearhead that has guided the growth of services in India in recent decades.
The BPO and, above all, IT in the country employing nearly 2.3 million people -8.2 million, if you count the indirect jobs, and exports have become 26 percent of national total , compared with 4 percent from 1998.
"There was nothing. People brought home to use curtains as sound barriers. And then, when I listened to talk to U.S. customers, you thought 'oh God, we can get anywhere,' "recalled Bhasin landing in Gurgaon.

The new India facing their particular housing bubble

New Delhi, October 22, 2006. - The huge Indian GDP growth has been accompanied by increases of 100 percent annually in the price of housing in some areas of the capital, New Delhi, where golf courses are raised with the slums .
Simply browse just housing supplements of major newspapers to realize that India is experiencing a real estate fever particularly in the case of the capital of the apartments has a good reach for most in a country whose GDP, more to grow, gallops to 10 percent.
An example of escalating prices is the central artery Panchseel Urban Road, where rents were in the first half of this year 110 percent higher than in 2005.
These days, the local newspaper "The Times of India" said wryly that to own a house in the downtown streets, valued at some 23 million euros, have to be a minister, an issue which would not comment Efe responsible Development of Delhi, DD Neemodhar.
And indeed, one of the finest neighborhoods to live, Aurangzeb Road, is packed with great dignitaries who paid a rental income of 8,000 euros per month in a country where tea costs ten cents.
According to the promoter told Efe Yograj Agrawal, urban pressures of the capital comes from its "shortage of land" which has caused many investors have turned their interests to the "emerging markets of the towns adjacent to New Delhi".
The same consultant confirms M. Arvind, who told Efe that the high population density in Delhi has caused many residential areas are transformed into commercial, so there is no soil to live.
"Every three months the prices increase substantially and demand will continue to grow, especially since half of the customers just want high housing property as an investment for the future," said Arvind.
According to the consultant, who refused to call it speculation, it is a very wise investment as the economy continues to grow so fast, especially because, he said, "investing in housing is now 60 percent more profitable than anything else."
So, as happens in large European cities, many natives of Delhi have been forced to live in nearby towns and go to work every day to the capital.
But these new cities, far from being mere dormitories, are the best example of the strength India: Gurgaon, for example, only during the past year have been leased 450,000 square meters of land for business use, at prices 44 percent expensive than the previous year.
That's easy to see lines of business and shopping centers as a symptom of what in India is known as the "second revolution", an opening to capitalism since 1993, has generated "reverse ghettos" of residential neighborhoods isolated from the poverty.
In town, near New Delhi, will rise 20 luxury hotels with 10,000 rooms by 2010, coinciding with the celebration in India of the Commonwealth Games.
Many young couples look to that time as fetish year, according to Arvind Agarwal and mark the end of the "boom" of the house.
But until then, many fear that prices of new houses in Gurgaon, this urban fervor reflected in its luxury shopping centers, golf courses and an emerging middle class, continue to grow at the rate of 180 percent this year.
And then, as Arvind said, "when Gurgaon has unaffordable prices, there will a lot of ground in the rest of India to build houses."