If the NASSCOM prediction of 1.1 million jobs by 2008 is anything to go by, India needs to ramp-up fast in order to meet the demands of this booming industry.

This represents a major Human Resource challenge for us. Although the Indian universities produce over two million English-speaking graduates every year, which is 40 per cent more than the United States, only about 30 per cent of this work force is job-ready, according to the industry estimate.

A Gartner Fact Book on the Indian BPO industry indicates that the top factor that makes India an attractive destination for BPO operations is our huge base of easily trainable, neutral-accent, English-speaking human resource. English is taught as the first language in most urban schools and is widely accepted as the primary language for business communication. This is critical to most BPO services. Yet, the irony is that out of every 100 graduates that apply to call centres, just two or three get selected --- the rest are summarily rejected. This is because although we have a potential workforce of over a million, only a small proportion of this workforce is job ready. The rest do not exactly fit the bill as required by the BPO industry This section of our students are either poor communicators, or poorly groomed, or don’t possess good customer interaction skills to be engaged in this industry.

As a result, service providers often have to arrange for in-house training to meet the manpower demand shortfall, which, given the high attrition rate (35%) eventually turns out to be a cost-ineffective proposition for the BPO vendors. Typically, companies spend 10-12 per cent on the training of a fresh graduate. The cost of accent training alone ranges between Rs 25,000 and Rs 50,000 for a two-to-five-month session. For a 300-seater call centre facing the normal 30 percent attrition, this translates into a whopping expenditure of Rs 60 lakh per annum, which can be a serious dampener for this industry.