Outsourcing reaches rural India - The Washington Post

MALLASAMUDRAM, India — The fact that a 23-year-old Indian engineering graduate is tutoring American high school students in math over the Internet is hardly unusual anymore.

But Pradeepa Mallur is not based in Bangalore, the capital of the Indian outsourcing industry, or another big city. Instead, she still lives with her parents in a small village in southern India and works in an air-conditioned office on a college campus in a village nearby.

After two decades of furious growth, Bangalore is showing signs of strain, and not just in terms of ever-worsening traffic congestion and occasional social unrest, but also in a shortage of skilled workers that is pushing up wages and leading to high employee attrition rates.

But in small towns and villages all over India, there is a glut of graduates who either cannot or do not want to move to a big city, many of them young women like Mallur, who is from a conservative family and is reluctant to leave home before marriage.

Matching that demand for workers with the untapped supply has become the mission of four veteran former employees of Indian IT giant Wipro, who say their idea could unleash another wave of transformative growth and wealth creation across the Indian landscape.

“India has close to 2,000 good engineering colleges, all in small towns, and no jobs,” said Anand Talwai, co-founder and executive director of NextWealth. “At the moment, they all have to come to the big cities, but why can’t we take jobs to them? Even at a lower salary, the quality of life is better for them at home.”

Talwai and business partner Sridhar Mitta were the ninth and first employees, respectively, of Wipro Technologies in 1981, working out of a basement with founder Azim Premji.

Three decades later, the two men, nearing retirement age, decided they wanted to give something back to society.

With two other former Wipro employees, they started NextWealth, a company meant to provide a social service while generating profits and encouraging entre­pre­neur­ship. The company aims to distribute some of the fruits of India’s IT success to the countryside, to fulfill the potential of aspirational, educated young people from small towns and villages.

With its headquarters in Bangalore, NextWealth is trying to create a network of partner companies across rural India, in or around fast-growing towns and cities to provide international-quality outsourcing work at half the cost of the big Indian cities.

“We have reached a status in life where we are happy with what we have and can share with others,” Talwai said.

NextWealth works through local entrepreneurs, taking a 26 percent equity stake in their companies but providing the brand, expertise, experience and clients the companies need to convince people to take outsourcing to the next level.

“It is a mixture of the experience of the elders with the energy and entrepreneurship of youth,” said Mallikarjun Huralikoppi, who has opened a NextWealth partner company providing payroll services in the city of Hubli.