Friday, July 14, 2006

India's call centers hit mid-life crisis

KOLKATA - Last month, 93 employees of Belair UK, a back-office services company, received a nasty jolt when they returned to their office after a two-day break. They found the office locked and their employer gone.

According to reports, Rajat Ohrie, Belair India chief executive officer, had asked his Indian colleagues on June 11 to take two days off so he could sort out issues regarding unreleased salaries from the United Kingdom headquarters. However, he apparently took advantage of the employee absence to quietly pack up the operation and flee India.

But even as the employees as well as the country's back-office workers' unions are planning widespread protests against this closure, Belair's Indian staff are not the only workers suffering a similar fate.

Three high-profile foreign business process outsourcing (BPO) companies in June abruptly pulled out of India, putting more than 1,000 employees on the street. Questions are now being raised about whether all's well with the Indian call-center business, a phenomenon that made India a leader in the global information technology-enabled back-office business.

It was Apple Computers that led the pullout by announcing in the first week of June that it was shutting down its newly launched tech-support facility in Bangalore. "We have decided to set up our planned support-center growth in other countries," Apple spokesperson Steve Dowling said...

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