The Hindu Business Line : ‘Smaller cities may capture 2-3 m IT/BPO jobs by 2018’

Location roadmap: (From left) Mr Som Mittal, President, Nasscom; Dr Ganesh Natarajan, Chairman, Nasscom; and Mr Saurine Doshi, Partner, A.T. Kearney, during the release of Nasscom-A.T. Kearney study on ‘Location roadmap for IT-BPO growth’ in the Capital on Monday.

Our Bureau

New Delhi, May 5 The smaller cities or ‘non leader cities’ could end up capturing 2-3 million IT and BPO jobs by 2018, if Government and industry take concrete measures for balanced growth, entailing development of infrastructure, improving curriculum in line with industry needs, and ensuring human resources development.

According to a study released on Monday by Nasscom and A.T. Kearney, the current growth is focused on the seven leading cities (Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, National Capital Region (NCR) and Pune) which together account for 85 per cent of the IT sector employment and over 90 per cent of the BPO employment in the country.

Absorbing growth

Apart from employment, these cities have realised significant gains in terms of improved visibility, consumption-led economic growth and improvement in social infrastructure.

“We believe that over the next decade, share of the sectoral employment in the top seven locations will decline to around 60-75 per cent with the total direct employment in these locations growing to 5-6 million. Absorbing this growth will pose a significant challenge to the physical and social infrastructure in these locations. At the same time, other locations have an opportunity to capture 2-3 million direct IT-BPO jobs — this is more than the total current employment in the sector,” Mr Som Mittal, President of Nasscom, said.

Four categories

The analysis indicates that based on stages of development, the locations can be categorised into four groups — leaders, challengers, followers and aspirants.

While ‘challengers’ includes cities such as Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Coimbatore, Indore, Jaipur, Kochi and Lucknow, the ‘followers’ includes locations such as Aurangabad, Bhopal, Goa, Gwalior, Hubli-Dharwad, Kanpur, Mysore, and Nashik.

The ‘aspirant’ category includes Allahabad, Dehradun, Durgapur, Gangtok, Guwahati, Ludhiana, Patna and Raipur.

Developing vision

“Decongestion of growth at a macro level and enhancing the level of attractiveness at a location level will require each IT and BPO industry stakeholder to play a proactive role in creating the ecosystem for the sector.

These include developing the right vision for the IT and BPO sector development at a location, aggressive focus on enhancing the quantity of talent pool available at a location and addressing issues related to talent suitability, enhancing awareness of international and domestic BPO careers amongst stakeholders, and improvement and development of physical infrastructure and urban environment,” the report added.

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