The Hindu Business Line : Mid-life crisis ahead for call centres?

PASSIONS run high when issues relating to Alang, the world's largest ship-breaking yard, are discussed. There are many who see the Gujarat port town as a death factory with sub-human working conditions. Then there are those who feel that these attempts to undermine Alang are part of a larger conspiracy to steer the lucrative steel recycling business away from Indian shores.

Passions run similarly high these days on call centres/BPO outfits. While the arguments, both for and against the industry, have remained largely academic, many a life has been altered by these call centres. For instance, Mr Nair's. I met Mr Nair a year ago, on November 2, 2004, the day Mr George W. Bush got re-elected to a second term in office. He had hoped that Mr John Kerry would win. Mr Nair's support for Kerry was based on the surmise that the latter would crack the whip on outsourcing work to India and save a whole generation from the malaise of dumbing down, instead of turning into a secretarial pool for the West.

A typical Malayalee matriculate who migrated from Kerala in the mid-70s and landed a job as typist in an Ahmedabad textile mill, Mr Nair finally found his calling as a secretary in the secretarial pool of the Gujarat Government.

Somewhere in the 1980s, he married a bright young stenographer, also from the secretarial pool who eventually rose to a position of power in the Finance Department.

Coming from such a background, it was hardly surprising that Mr Nair went about meticulously laying out plans for his children to take up engineering and business management. I could readily empathise with Mr Nair when his plans began to go awry, first with his son, an engineering graduate, and then his daughter, on the verge of joining a business management school, opting to take up jobs at call centres in Ahmedabad.

For the family, the plans of the new generation came as an unpleasant shock and a sense of déjà vu overtook them, with one generation of backroom operations people giving way to the next. I called up Mr Nair the other day on reading about a study by the V. V. Giri National Institute of Labour that likened the degree of surveillance in call centres to 19th century prisons and Roman slave ships.

And with news coming out about a book that put Indian call centres under the scanner — One Night @ The Call Centre — it appeared the industry had hit a minor hurdle in its hitherto unchallenged romp among the Indian youngsters.

That matters were getting a bit hot for the industry was borne out by the Nasscom chief, Mr Kiran Karnik, coming out with a spirited defence of the `cutting edge' HR practices followed by the domestic BPOs. And the latest to join issue is Mr Dayanidhi Maran, Union Minister for Information Technology, who on Wednesday said BPOs were the pride of the nation. "Attempts are being made to prevent India from being at the lead in the IT services and outsourcing arena," he said.

According to Mr Nair, it is difficult to imagine young Sandy (Sandhya), Chris (Krishnamoorthy), Isabel (Isha) and Roger (Rajinder) holding on to their call centre jobs. It is a matter of time before they realise that there is more to life than speaking with put-on American or European accents.

"My children are right now in a make-believe world where their day begins at 9 p.m. and ends at 6-30 a.m. The money is good but I cannot imagine them doing this for 20-30 years. The sheer stress of sustaining a backroom system here to support real life in the US would begin to tell soon," Mr Nair prophesied, keeping his fingers crossed that his wards would get disenchanted with the virtual working culture and return to a `normal' life soon enough.

Clearly, this reappraisal of BPO as a career option, at least by a few, comes at a time when the Government has estimated that the demand for call centre employees will reach one million by 2009, a three-fold growth from about 3.5 lakh now.

One could deliberate endlessly whether the Sandies and Isabels and Rogers will continue to man the call centre even in their middle age. Given the average age of the Indian call centre operator is 25, these are indeed early days to speculate.

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