A NUMBER of call centres (CC) are being set up in the major cities like in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. These can be a source of employment. These centres are a well-known form of outsourcing, which is a product of the present day globalization. Outsourcing has been defined as contracting a part of its business operations by a company to establishments outside. In other words, outsourcing means engaging third parties to operate a specific set of business process in either on-shore but, increasingly, in off-shore locations.

It involves ‘relocation of business functions and process to a lower cost location on a long-term basis. Call centres located in India created work for off-shore employers. They took care of a host of routine activities of their multinational giants. Thus, employees of these centres enjoyed relatively better pay scales and other benefits.

One does not require any special degree or life-time experience to be employed at call centres. The essential requirements are to be computer literate with good communication and typing skills, along with a knowledge of good English. The workers at the CC are generally young, between 20 to 30 years. They are usually high-school graduates, with fluency in English. About a month of training enables them to join the CC as a customer-care executive.

Pravin Sinha, in his book entitled ‘Dilemma of organising IT Workers—the case of India’, describes how a CC worker usually performs duties. Most of the CC located in the East work during the night to adjust with the time differentials of their customers who are in the West. The working day of a CC employee starts at about 18.00 hours when the company’s transport picks him up from his residence. After a while, the worker finds himself in his well-illuminated and beautiful office. After receiving brief instructions from his boss, he enters into a small cubicle equipped with a computer and telephone where he has to attend 100 to 125 calls in eight hours. The worker is allowed to go to the toilet twice, break for meal once and beverage once— all of which must be completed in 60 minutes. The CC worker can have plenty of chatting on the Net, once he has achieved the target calls.

The call centres have their merits as well as demerits. But the merits had so far outweighed the demerits. In addition to a far more decent salary that a CC worker draws, there are other attractions, too, such as door-to-door transport, security guards escorts, refreshments, picnics and excursions, besides the status of a multinational worker.

As regards demerits, CC jobs are stressful and cause disruption in one’s social life. The old working hours, making day-long sleeping a necessity, render the CC worker inaccessible to his friends and relatives. Thus, he is cut off from society. At times, the job becomes extremely frustrating due to arrogant and abusive customers. Particularly for female CC workers (who are reported to be in majority in India), the job becomes much more difficult due to the disapproval and strong opposition of some of family members.

Despite the aforesaid difficulties, more and more young people have been offering their services for the CC, because of growing unemployment among the educated workforce, fear of lay-off as a result of restructuring and downsizing and poor wages and working conditions offered by other employers.

But the multinationals do not target a country for setting up call centres, unless the objective conditions in that country are ideally suited to the establishment of such CC. A long time ago, the then Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had introduced computer in the educational institutions and subsequent Indian governments also played their part in advancing information technology in the country.

In addition, the preference for English language based education in public and private schools and the use of that language as a medium of conversation in middle class families had helped in producing an army of English-speaking boys and girls. Prof Michael Dertouzos, Director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory of Computer Science says that India has over 50 million English-speaking people, who were also computer literate.

The preference of the multinationals for India was, also, attributable to India producing nearly two million English-speaking graduates every year, who could be employed at wages 80 per cent lower than their Western counterparts, resulting in enormous cost saving to the foreign companies.

According to reports, the cost of operation in India was currently 37 per cent lower than in China and 17 per cent lower than in Malaysia. In addition, India had language advantage over China. Over and above all that, the cost of one minute telephone call from India to the UK had come down more than 85 per cent since January, 2001. This resulted in considerable cost saving to the international companies.

Prospects of new job opportunities and increase in foreign exchange earnings has induced many countries including Pakistan to initiate measures to create suitable environment for the setting up of call centres. China had made teaching of English compulsory in its schools and colleges, hoping to bring out large numbers of English-speaking graduates within the next four to five years to offset India’s advantage.

Pakistan, today, was among those countries which presented an option to the intending foreign companies to get a part of their business delivered from this country.

Due to lower labour costs, coupled with current exchange rate of Pakistan rupee vis-a-vis US dollar, Pakistan offered relatively better cost advantage to foreign companies, even as compared to India.

During the last five years, the use of computer and internet has grown at a tremendous speed as a result of government policy attaching high priority to this sector. According to current estimate, about 1.5 million people use the computer and internet facility in Pakistan.

The number of English-speaking high school graduates was also on the increase, thanks to the rapid growth of English medium school in recent years. The boom in the mobile phone and telecom sector has brought down telephone charges considerably in recent months which could result in further cost reduction of foreign companies.

A conference held in Karachi on May 7, 2005 call centres estimated that nearly one hundred thousand jobs could be created at the CC the next five years. The matter has to pursued vigorously including meaningful assistance to intending foreign investors in developing the necessary infrastructure and training facilities, in order to make the CC affair a real success.