Transtek BPO skills course to empower blind

School will address manpower shortage

"The ITeS sector in West Bengal is worth Rs 1000 crore and medical transcription industry will be worth about 30-40 per cent of that market," said Sudarshan Bagri, managing director of Transtek.

Medical transcription would be one of the major drivers of employment and companies were already refusing contracts work because of a shortage of trained personnel, Bagri added.

"A graduate from any stream can earn about Rs 10,000 per month after a few years of training," he claimed.

Visually impaired people had long been neglected and their employment potential had been ignored, Kaushik Dutta, executive director of Transtek, alleged.

Transtek had come across a study of American companies employing visually impaired people and one such area where they had been very successful was medical transcription, Dutta explained.

"Transtek turned to Stella Alsen of the American Association of Medical Transcription (AAMT) as a consultant for expertise in medical transcription training to develop a six-month training programme for five hours a day to interested students of the RKM blind academy. The basic English language and keyboard skills will be provided by the RKM Blind Academy at Narendrapur," Bagri explained.

G D Gautama, information technology (IT) secretary of West Bengal, said that with the highest per capita spend on education and highest internet penetration in the country, ventures such as these would help Bengal move forward and help make neglected visually impaired people self-reliant.

At present, Bengal had only 1000 medical transcription professionals or so and the market potential indicated tremendous sope for growth.

To take IT development beyond Kolkata to the other corners of the state, the government has already commissioned IT parks in Kharagpur, Durgapur, Siliguri and Haldia.

The parks would be commisioned by December 2005, Gauatama claimed.

After completion of training, Transtek would absorb the boys and help place them with companies depending on demand.

The company planned to open branches in the district towns of Srirampore, Durgapur and Asansol for medical transcription training besides the two existing in the city.