Tourism giving way to cyber-culture in Agra

VISHAL SHARMA

AGRA, 18 Nov.
“Good Morning, this is Rob from Infoway Solutions, Dallas; how can I help you?” This sentence may seem out of place coming from the lips of a teenager chattering away into his headphone in a remote town of India, but with the trend of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) becoming increasingly common, it would not appear strange to you in barely a few months.

After the metros, the effects of burgeoning Indian economy have started to show on the B & C class cities of the country. With a large chunk of the populace well-conversant in English, these cities are fast becoming major outsourcing destinations for the corporates around the world. Within the past couple of years, the number of international call centres has grown exponentially in C class cities of Uttar Pradesh like Agra, which is slowly leaving its faltering tourism industry to enter the IT outsourcing arena.

The attraction of the huge cash influx generated by these Call Centres is beginning to attract the big industrial players of Agra. Even the bigwigs of tourism industry have been quick to shut down their emporiums and hop in the bandwagon after the tourism season failed for the consecutively twelfth year. With their business too becoming less cost-effective by the day, Cyber-café owners are also gearing up to enter this segment.

Dubbed as the fastest growing industry in the country, the 3.6 billion US$ worth Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry has taken these economically weak cities with a storm experienced never before. All of a sudden, the youth of these cities have become aware of the changing fashion trends, latest bikes, mobiles & other electronic paraphernalia.

Attracted with the factor of quick money and independence, semi-skilled young graduates stream into these call centres practising their “American” accent, trying to impress their way to the top with a dream of earning over seven thousand bucks per month, which they couldn’t dream of in any other private job.

“I couldn’t ask my dad to pay for it, so I bought it with two months salary”, says Amit Raj, glancing lovingly at his latest possession – a camera phone. Amit works as a Customer Care Representative (CCR) with SI-Infotech, one of the over dozen call centres making their presence felt in Agra in the past few months. He enjoys viewing Stallone movies on “his DVD”, which he acquired last month, “even dad pops in to watch his oldies sometimes”, he winks. When asked about the effect of the “unearthly” hours of work he had to put in during the six months of working as a CCR, he quickly adds, “the perks are worth the trouble, besides, performance-based raises are quick to come by”.

Anurag Pratap Singh, managing partner at Alpha Informatics, points out, “it is a common belief that the youngsters from small towns like Agra do not fit in the big BPO scene but from our experience, we can say that the untapped talent available here is as good as the metros.”

Asked about the problems he had to face when he established the call-centre in the city, he smiles, “the biggest problem was to convince the property dealers that we weren’t going to run a phone-sex racket from their property as we had to seek permission to operate 24 hours. Next, came the bandwidth procurement part, which, thanks to Satyam opening its Point of Presence (POP), was easy once we knocked the right doors.” “We never had any problems in recruiting the right guys but we prefer graduates instead of school passouts”, he adds.

(UNITED NEWS NETWORK)