Rural areas can become back offices for urban India

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is an industry that people relate with the operation of outsourcing business mostly based in Tier I and II cities of the country.

However, this thought has been rendered as a mythical view in the recent times. The actual ground fact remains that a majority of the computer engineers (almost 60%) working in the BPO industry hail from the rural areas and aspire to find job opportunities in the top tier cities such as Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru among other cities.

How opportunistic it could be if some of these deeply penetrated talent is tapped to be employed locally or in nearby rural or town areas?

The major constraints for building up such rural level BPO settings lay in creating infrastructure, prospects of scaling business growth above a certain hierarchy, funding requirements for the start-ups involved and pooling together the requisite talent from the nearby villages and towns as well as convincing them about the rural job opportunities as against shifting to bigger tier cities with higher pay potential.

And progressively looking to reach out to the next cheapest grabber is now firmly knocking at the doors of rural India encompassing Tier 2 and 3 cities, towns and villages, Will lead the rise of rural BPOs in India.

What Triggered the Rise of Rural BPOs in India?

Though achieving extreme cost benefits has been the underlying force driving businesses to set up BPOs in rural India, there are other crucial factors which have augmented this BPO trend.

1. Tasks Becoming Increasingly Mundane

When tier 1 cities started servicing more knowledge intensive jobs like Knowledge Process Outsourcing and Legal Process Outsourcing among others, non-core tasks like Data Entry and Automated Data Processing Services became non-challenging and non-competitive to the highly qualified resources in these cities. This also triggered the slow and steady movement of these kinds of jobs to tier-2 and tier-3 cities, towns, and villages, indicating a changing scenario for the BPO sector in India.

2. Change Driven by Nature of Job

Certain jobs like Native Language Transcription or conversion, or jobs requiring low or no need of understanding English language, basic skills involving monotonous or little usage of software and computer skills etc., all became the ball bearings for inducing the rural outsourcing and rural IT BPO industry in India.

3. Rising Costs in Cities

With India vying for major software contracts and its emergence as world’s leading software service provider; the cost of living, infrastructure, medical care, etc., has seen a sharp rise in the cities, invariably affecting the cost of BPO services in India, which has sort of reached a tipping point now. This also made businesses to set up rural BPO centers which are extremely cheaper.

4. Top Challenges Faced By Rural BPOs

Obviously the extreme cost benefits do not come easy. The challenges posed by rural BPO in India seem extremely difficult, and at times impossible too, but not insurmountable. Let’s have a look at the things that do not portray favorable picture of Rural BPOs:

Power Facility : Some villages in India are still awaiting power connections, and others who have experienced the light bulb but are still marred with long power cuts and poor quality electrical connections.