NSR registers half of directly-employed IT workforce

Expects to touch 70%-mark by 2020

In its fifth year, the National Skills Registry (NSR), a national database of verified workers in the information technology and business process management (IT-BPM) sector, has succeeded in registering nearly half of the workforce directly employed in the sector and hopes to cover at least 70 per cent of same by 2018-2020.

In April this year, NSR made its highest ever registrations in a single month at 16,421 professionals, taking the total registered workforce to 1.5 million. According to Nasscom, the IT and BPM sector directly employees around 3.1 million workers in India.

"Most large and mid-sized companies in the IT and BPM space have made it mandatory for new employees to be NSR-registered at the time of recruitment, and that is helping us expand our database in the freshers as well as laterals hiring space," said K S Viswanathan, vice president - Industry Initiatives at Nasscom.

"We are registering around 178,000 professionals per year, and by that calculation we should have touched about 70 per cent of the total headcount by 2018-2010," he added.

NSR was started by industry body Nasscom about five years ago and is run by NDML, a fully-owned subsidiary of the National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL). It mainly aims to build a credible information repository on IT professionals in order to make it easier for companies within the sector to have hire verified professionals without spending on background verification every time.

The NSR maintains a permanent fact sheet of information on professionals along-with photograph and appropriate background checks, thus providing identity security for the organisation and its clients. It also includes biometric details to ensure unique identification of each professional.

While NSR has been able to register almost the entire fresh workforce entering the industry, the registrations of experienced professionals has been slow, Viswanathan said. Within the lateral hiring space, he said, the BPM industry is ahead of the IT services companies in the number of registrations.

"We have close to 140 companies who are registered with us," he said. "However, a lot of the experienced workforce is based outside India and so it is hard for us to register them. But companies are putting in efforts to get these employees also registered, and every time they visit India, they try and get registered with NSR."

While industry experts laud the objectives of this initiative, some believe that the NSR meeds to work on strengthening some aspects.

"NSR has a good intent but it has run into some challenges because of the parity in information being generated by the 18 different the background verification firms that it works with," said Navin Chugh, managing director and senior vice president of background screening firm First Advantage. "Also, there is a need to make investments into this initiative, which is not there.

Additionally, the head of anther background verification firm, who did not wish to be named, said that even as companies have made NSR mandatory, they are not willing to share much information about their employees, which does not make the system transparent. "Companies should put out the details of at least those employees who have left them, in a digital format, to make NSR more effective," the person said.

However, most stakeholders in the industry believe that NSR has started giving them a competitive edge at the time of seeking out a new opportunity, and Viswanathan believes that this trend will gradually bring even the "outliers" want to become a part of it.