Can Indian Manpower Scale to Meet Rising World BPO Demands?

According to a recent Mckinsey report, the demand for business process outsourcing (BPO) services in India will rise 20 fold in the next five years to about 20 billion dollars. This represents an area of great potential to the citizens of this increasingly important third world country. However, there is some speculation that India may not be prepared for the growth in front of it.

Based on sheer population size, India should be able to handle the worlds outsourcing needs for years to come. In 1999, India reached 1 billion citizens.

Many of these Indian citizens, however, are unable to participate in the world economy. Among the adult population, 54% cannot read or write. It will be a challenge to fix this problem, as India has recently experienced a large population burst. As if 1999, 338 million of it's citizens were under the age of 15.

Currently, the best and brightest of India's students are being drawn to work in BPO. However, the demands are rising more quickly than India's best institutions can graduate students. The end result is that less educated people will be trained to perform the same tasks.

In many cases, this change in employment structure should be acceptable. Often, the highly educated college graduates performing BPO tasks are over skilled for the menial business are over skilled for their tedious and repetitive jobs. Top graduates accepted these jobs, merely because the Western companies sponsored a higher wage.

India should be most worried about is maintaining a reputation for high quality outsourcing service. In order to keep Western clients interested in sponsoring new and more aggressive projects, Indian companies cannot just rely on low costs to win contracts. Reliability and high quality are key. To meet these demands, educating a greater portion of the population will be critical.