ICICI BPO arm zeroes in on Kolkata

Firm hunts for one lakh square feet of office area which would create 1,000 more jobs

Business process outsourcing (BPO) service provider, ICICI OneSource, backed by the ICICI group, has decided to set up an offshore delivery centre in Kolkata.

At present, the company currently employs around 6,000 employees across eight offshore delivery centres in Amherst "" USA, Bangalore and Mumbai and in-market teams in the US and in UK.

When contacted, an official spokesperson of the company confirmed that the company would be setting up a centre in Kolkata, which would be operational by the end of the current financial year. However, she refused to divulge the size of proposed operations.

But, real estate sources said, the company was looking at space for around one lakh square feet. Going by the industry thumb rule of 90-100 square feet of space per person, one lakh square feet would translate into space for at least 1,000 employees.

State IT department sources said, the company was likely to scale up operations to 2,500 employees in Kolkata.

ICICI OneSource, it may be mentioned, was among India's leading pure-play BPO service providers with expertise for consumer industries including financial services, telecom, healthcare, utilities, media, retail and print & publishing.

Apart from ICICI group, the other significant stakeholders in the company were Temasek Holdings of Singapore and Westbridge Capital Partners.

ICICI OneSource would join BPO service providers like Wipro BPO, which currently has an employee strength of 1,400, in Kolkata.

HSBC Electronic Data Processing India would commence operations in the city by the third quarter of this year and GE, which has already started with a pilot project was expected to scale up operations.

ICICI was likely to take up space in one of walk-in infrastructure projects that were in the offing.

Among them is the Infinity (Tower II) comprising 1.80 lakh square feet, Infinity Benchmark comprising 5.50 lakh square feet, Infinity Waterside 5.30 lakh sqaure feet and Technopolis 6.75 lakh square feet.

Further, a two Super Tower Facility of 3 lakh square feet each at Bengal Intelligent Park and 2.50 lakh square feet at Techna Plot along with a 3 lakh square feet of the PS group and Millennium park comprising 2.80 lakh square feet, were coming up.

DLF group was developing an IT park at Rajarhat,which would add 1.3 million sqaure feet. Ascendas and Videocon were also setting up facilities creating two million square feet of space, each.