BPO wave touches hinterland with H-P project

After encapsulating the metros and dabbling with the tier II cities, the BPO wave looks set to march into Indian villages. Taking the lead is global information technology major Hewlett-Packard (HP), which, in a pilot project, will move 50 to 100 call centre seats to its 'i-community' at Kuppam in Andhra Pradesh, near the Karnataka border.

Anand Tawkar, director, emerging market solutions of HP said, " HP is looking to move a part of its low-end BPO work like data entry, formatting, paper turning and scanning from Bangalore to Kuppam. The pilot project, scheduled to begin before the year is out, will be in the threshold of 50 to 100 seats."

However, the size of the ITES centre can be much bigger, as participation of other ITES firms looks possible as well. For instance, the Delhi based Datamation, which is currently testing out the prowess of the villagers by outsourcing four seats for its data entry work, has indicated its intention to scale it up. HP officials expect this arrangement to offer a further 20 to 25 seats in the next three months.

Officials said, the trial project in Kuppam had revealed that the right level of skill sets for such low-end operations existed and the growth of such ITES firms in villages will arrest the migration of educated youth to cities in search of similar work.

They added, the training centre under the i-community banner is already gearing up to train locals on computer based education in a bid to create a talent pool for the proposed ITES facility.

An HP and Andhra Pradesh government collaboration, the Kuppam i-community seeks to build IT capabilities within the community and establish a sustainable economic model.

While it serves as a rural product and solutions testing hub for HP, the community benefits through programs like the ITES centre, citizen-government interface through the internet, and the farming information system.

To transfer matured i-community project: Meantime, HP is gearing up to transfer its i-community project at Kuppam to a yet to be floated transferee organisation by February 2005. The project has matured and HP's rural initiative/emerging market solutions will achieve returns in the next two years.

The company has so far invested $2 million (around Rs 9 crore) in this initiative in India, primarily for the i-community programme. The i-community project started two years ago involves taking the ICT infrastructure to the countryside by devising low cost solutions for both hardware and software which villagers can use.

The technology incubator and hub at Kuppam set out to deliver programmes in education, healthcare and e-governance in order to develop low cost products for emerging markets.

Maureen Conway, vice-president, emerging market solutions, said, "We are already in consultations with several state governments, agencies and national organisations to vend rural IT solutions developed at our i-community."

The company has 25 initiatives now in the fields of health, education, economic and social empowerment and government interface. It is betting on a low cost ink jet printer and a 4-in-1 personal computer (a single CPU facilitating four machine operations), that it is presently testing out, to yield rich dividends.

Another revenue model that HP is looking at is replicating the solutions in other rural areas in India and abroad. In fact, the company a few days back showcased its i-community initiatives to IT secretaries from Himachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Assam and Uttaranchal.