"The potential is unlimited," says Prakash Gurbaxani, founder and chief executive of 24/7 Customer.com, a customer service center in Bangalore whose US clients include Web sites AltaVista and Shutterfly.com. Anticipating more business, the company's supermarket-sized call center is filled with dark-screened PCs and dwarfs its 300 employees.
"We have all the ingredients here in India to make this a world-class business. As they say in the US -- it is ours to lose," says Gurbaxani.
When one boards the plane in New Delhi for Bangalore, virtually every passenger is toting a laptop and sporting a T-shirt with a technology company logo. The city is awash with tech billboards and knapsack-laden geeks in a hurry.
Hundreds of thousands of computer programmers, software developers, medical transcribers and Web site designers here have left for overseas companies or work in Bangalore for them, filling a technology vacuum in the US, Britain and other European countries.
Not everyone is keen on the latest information worker phenomenon. Labor activists and intellectuals deem call centers badly paying sweatshops, where abysmal work conditions and long hours would be illegal in the countries of the companies providing them contracts.
Noted Indian author Arundhati Roy, an outspoken foe of globalization, recently wrote in an article condemning the West that the adoption of US accents for jobs in call centers shows "how easily an ancient civilization can be made to abase itself completely."
"You have to change your name from Arundhati to Annie and pretend that you're an American," she says, laughing.
"It's a very fascinating phenomenon ... the other side of religious fundamentalism."
RSS