Biggest BPO in Kolkata takes first call from Hewitt Associates- huge infrastructure built while BPO India Inc. is collapsing!
Kanta Purushottam, Special Correspondent
September 04, 2004 

Hewitt Associates has started exporting jobs from US to India according to local paper Statesman in Calcutta (Kolkata). Wipro is the Indian BPO Company processing the BPO work. They do trouble shooting for US customers who are losing jobs. Wipro with the blessing of local communist Government has built huge outsourcing infrastructure to suck all IT jobs out from US! The local people in Kolkata have no clue that outsourcing from US and UK is coming to halt due to political pressures and mainly from low quality of Indian work.

Wipro currently employs 400 employess in Kolkata and plans to expand operations on already built huge infrastructure to 1000 employees soon with a target of 100,000 in coming years. 

What is the net outcome? Can Wipro pull it through? Well they and the communists in Kolkata thinks so. But here is the problem. While IT outsourcing is the direct effect from deflationary pressures on US companies, the kind of work Indian companies do are repetitive in nature and can very easily replaced by automated software or Robots. The infrastructure the communists and some of the outsourcing companies have built can haunt them for a long time. The quality of work in India is so poor that the American and British companies are getting their lessons of their lifetime. The problem is that India had a protected economy without any foreign competition. For a long time the private sector of India is protected for the last forty years by the Indian Government from International Patent laws and foreign competition. As a result these companies are habituated in delivering very low quality. People in India have no place to go. The private sector literally extorts the local population.

Outsourcing from Kolkata is a big hope for this great but poor city. The Government is busy taking international loans and creating better infrastructure for IT and other industries. However, they do not know how to pay the loans back. Some expatriate Indians complain that it is easy to get into West Bengal but difficult to get out or really profit there. The same is true in China. It seems you are doing well but in the long run these international companies go nowhere.