Lessons from Salt Lake City, Kolkata

Communist China is today the second biggest economy in an open market global regime. It is a message has not been lost on our nearest communist provincial government, West Bengal.
In the last 20 years Kolkata, once the mightiest metropolis of the then British India, has seen its fortunes dwindle under communist rule as a stream of corporations left the city as they were stifled by the administration's anti-business sentiments. After years of stagnation that almost halved the city's white collar jobs, the communist regime has of late softened its stance on business and Kolkata's star has been incrementally rising on a wave of IT business investments in the last five years.
It's a welcome relief especially since the trajectory of such IT investments has eluded the eastern seaboard of India for quite some time. As one enters the brand-new highway linking Kolkata Airport with the city via Rajar Haat special economic zone, huge, under construction buildings and side roads come into view.
On a recent visit to India I had the opportunity to see how IT led businesses changed the landscape (and the skyscape) in the sprawling suburb of Kolkata named Salt Lake City. Nothing could have been further from the pristine surroundings of its mountainous namesake in Utah, USA during the old days when this Kolkata suburb reeked with the untreated wastes of tanneries.
But come 2008 and Salt Lake City is growing fast as a hotbed of software development and business process outsourcing (BPO) services and is vying for honours as one of the top four IT destinations in India. TCS, Infosys, Wipro, GE and many other top global brands in software and/or BPO services have set up megalithic establishments employing thousands of knowledge workers there.
According to Wikipedia the internet-age encyclopedia, business process outsourcing (BPO) is the leveraging of technology or specialist process vendors to provide and manage an organization's critical and/or non-critical enterprise processes and applications. The most common examples of BPO are call centres, human resources, accounting/payroll and pre-press graphics work outsourcing. Business process outsourcing may involve the use of off-shore resources.
The worldwide BPO market has been exploding in recent years it has doubled in size to nearly USD200 billion since the turn of the century according to IDC, a global data research organisation. India already has nearly half of the offshore component of this rapidly growing market. BPO can be very good business for us as well.
To thrive, BPO industry requires aggressive entrepreneurs, trainable workers with basic education and basic telecom/internet service all three of these supply side ingredients are to be found aplenty in Bangladesh.
Each year more than a million boys and girls finish 12 years of schooling here (i.e., appear in HSC and O'Level exams), less than half of whom enroll in tertiary (i.e., university level) education at home and abroad. This means that there are more than half a million such young men and women entering the job market each year who can very well be the drivers of a BPO industry here.
According to economic analysts more than three million people enter the job market each year who vie for less than a million jobs that become available each year. At least 20 percent of these job market entrants can potentially be absorbed in export of BPO services. The economic output of BPO services is also quite handsome compared to other labour-intensive industries. The per capita economic output in the ready-made garments industry our most successful export sector is approx. USD800.00 per annum (taking into account the gross export receipts minus imports of raw materials) while in BPO this figure is approx. USD2,500.00 i.e., more than triple.
However, to make this happen, we need to put call centres and other BPO business licensing procedures in place and provide a signal to entrepreneurs that the government is seriously bullish on this as bullish as the West Bengal government was in providing the necessary infrastructural and policy supports to make way for a thriving BPO industry there. With three million job seekers entering the market each year can we afford to do otherwise?
Let's go BPO right now!

Habibullah N Karim, a Software entrepreneur.