Outsourcing reaches rural India

Just as Mitta and Talwai once had to convince American executives that they could reliably outsource work to India, now they have to convince skeptical Indian city dwellers that their own rural hinterland is not the back of beyond.

“Fifteen or 20 years ago, when we went with Wipro to the U.S., we got a lot of questions and suspicion,” said Mitta, NextWealth’s managing director. “We would draw a map of the world and show where India is. And people would ask, ‘How do people know English there?’ ”

 

 

  

 

“Today we are doing the same thing, but with executives in Indian companies, who ask ‘Do people in Salem speak English? Do they have power? Do they have broadband?’ We have to keep answering and convincing them.”

Engines of the boom

India’s smaller cities and towns are fast becoming the engines of the country’s economic boom. Talwai and Mitta believe the IT industry can help to “spawn a revolution” in small-town India just as it did in the once-sleepy southern city of Bangalore,.

There are other companies, like Sparsh, trying to take outsourcing outside India’s big cities, offering back-office processing for domestic companies as well as call-center services in all of India’s 15 main languages, for businesses that want to be closer to their newest consumers.

“There is no point in talking Delhi Hindi to consumers in Punjab or rural Maharashtra,” said chief operating officer Radhika Balasubramanian. “This helps in building support with customers.”

But NextWealth aims to go beyond call-center work, outsourcing higher-level tasks, in English, for multinational companies at a quality that can match what’s available in Bangalore.

Sensitive to the old accusation that outsourcing merely undercuts existing jobs, NextWealth’s directors are at pains to point out that their model opens new opportunities for personalized work at rates that would not otherwise be commercially viable.

In the town of Chittoor in Andhra Pradesh, for example, NextWealth employees take clients’ digital photographs, perhaps of a holiday or special event, choose the best pictures, add designs and text, and ultimately produce a coffee-table book that no automated system could match. “In Chittoor, we are doing that for $3 an hour, which is profitable,” Talwai said. “That is work that didn’t exist earlier.”

More than seat-fillers

Down a rural road in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, past paddies and coconut palms and small farming villages, the Mahendra Engineering College suddenly looms into view.

In a four-story building on the campus is the office of Mahendra NextWealth, where employees code health-care claims and, like Mallur, tutor foreigners in math.

Their spoken English might not be perfect, director Faustino Avinash Rosario freely admits, but after completing an engineering degree in English, their command of the written language is excellent.

Instead of being swallowed up in the jaws of the outsourcing industry in Bangalore, Mahendra NextWealth’s roughly 250 employees said they felt they were treated like real people, not just seat-fillers.

“I love teaching, and I am very proud to work here,” said Mallur, sitting at her desk in her sari with jasmine in her hair, writing equations on a tablet that appear on a computer screen in far-away Michigan. “If I went to Bangalore, I would have to leave my family, but it is more comfortable to stay with my parents. I also find it extremely safe.”