Nasscom NSR target appears unachievable

The herculean effort and complexity involved in getting IT-BPO employees and employers to register "" coupled with the high costs incurred in the process "" is likely to force IT industry body Nasscom to miss its March 2008 target of 500,000 registrations for its National Skills Registry (NSR) by a huge margin. The registration figure currently stands at 160,000.

This August, the figure stood at 125,000 (60 per cent of which were online registrations) when Nasscom had stated it was hopeful of taking the figure to 500,000 by December 2007.

Kiran Karnik, Nasscom President, says: "The target is for March 2008 and not December 2007. This (the press statement figure) is definitely an error."

However, given that Nasscom is adding around 25,000 registrations for the last two months, the target seems way off even for March 2008. Karnik admits the 500,000 target "is very hard to reach at this point of time" but adds "we are trying our best".

"Implementation is the main cause of the slow progress," he points out.

The process is long-drawn. For instance, an information technology professional's fingerprints are collected by the points of service (PoS) and converted by its software application into a database value.

This is then uploaded to the NSR central system which validates and uploads the data. An audit trail is maintained in the database that tracks all actions like login, logout and data updates by users.

The registration fee per person varies from Rs 300 to Rs 500. For a validation or verification check, existing or prospective employers will have to shell out between Rs 1,500 and Rs 2,000.

The IT-BPO sector needs a National Skills Registry (NSR), reasons Nasscom, since it provides direct employment to over 1.6 million people and over 6.4 million indirectly (for every one job created in the IT-BPO sector, four jobs are created in the rest of the economy).

With exports estimated to touch $60 billion-mark in 2010, incidents of data security breaches and issues relating to employee verification could act as hindrance to reach this target.

The NSR was launched in January 2006 to address these issues. Karnik had earlier said that Nasscom would "leave no stone unturned to make India the "Fort Knox" of security, positioning ourselves as the gold standard for security as we are today for quality... Like airport security, this (NSR) is a necessary process that we all need to go through, in our own interest."

The task is onerous but Karnik is undeterred: "I am willing to sacrifice targets for rigour. We want to involve the IT industry as a whole, including smaller companies and towns. We can increase the numbers by concentrating on bigger companies, but that defeats the purpose."

Why IT-BPO firms need the NSR

Employees have to be registered with NSR to be hired

No employer can, on its own, add anything to the registry except purely factual data

Employers and employees can request for background checks by reputed agencies

Employees can view the results of the agency checks

Employees of vendor companies (transport, canteen, security, etc) will soon be included