The New Boom

Better Off Than Dad

Services Sector: Growth Engine

Faces: Adventure Capitalists

Adapters: Tradition Meets Technology

Industry: Being Indian

Careers: Techies Line Up For Jobs Online

The Scindias: Will Power
The contentious will of Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia virtually disinherits her only son Madhavrao Scindia. This controversy threatens to mar the reputation and respectability of one of India's best- known and highly regarded royal families.

Gujarat: Shaky Regime
Confronted with a monumental disaster, the Gujarat Government is at the centre of relief operations. Was its reaction timely and efficient? Could more lives have been saved?

And Greed Hits Home
More than anything, it was corruption that killed people in Gujarat as buildings constructed by getting around norms came crashing down.

Public Sector: Shotgun Exit
First large PSU where workers agreed to leave the company.

THE NEW ECONOMY: CAREERS

Call Centres
Ringing in a fortune

G.D. Binani Managing Director, Dialnet

Qualifications: High school certificate, knowledge of English and a good voice

Starting Salary: Rs 5,000-10,000 a month

Employment: 2,800 in 1999; 1,00,000 in 2008 (projection)

Revenue: Rs 100 crore in 1999; Rs 6,000 crore in 2008 (projection)

Like most successful business concepts, the idea of the call centre is superbly simple: it uses satellite connectivity and computerised telephone systems to provide a range of services to clients across geographical barriers.

In many countries, airlines, to cite but one industry, have toll-free numbers to which people can call 24 hours a day to make flight reservations. Typically, a call centre is equipped with telecom facilities, trained consultants, access to wide databases, Internet and other infrastructure to provide support services to customers. Since everybody is connected to the same computing facility, it does not matter if the call centre is located in the city of the caller or half-way across the world. In other words, the caller may dial a local telephone number in the US, but it is answered in India.

While some companies set up customised call centres themselves, others employ call centre service providers. This gives Indian entrepreneurs a golden opportunity. Spectramind, a 10-month-old Delhi-based company, is providing call centre services to several MNCs. On the other hand, Dialnet, a four-year-old Delhi-based company, sticks to a specialised niche: interactive voice systems or computer telephony.

One of its clients is Unit Trust of India, for which Dialnet's system lets a policy holder retrieve information about his investment simply by dialling a seven-digit phone number. Other clients include TV show Kaun Banega Crorepati, Coca-Cola and ESPN. Dialnet Managing Director G.D. Binani, 39, describes himself as a ''telecom geek'' and says the niche that Dialnet has chosen is ''still in the nascent, awareness-building stage''. He is confident that the market will explode in the next five years.

In 1999, a NASSCOM study had estimated that India's call centres employed about 2,800 people. The number can be assumed to have doubled by January 2001. With several big players setting up call centres in Hyderabad (GE and HSBC), Bangalore (Dell Computers, Sun Microsystems) and Delhi's suburbia such as Gurgaon (GE Capital and American Express), fortune is calling India.

-Shuchi Sinha

Backroom Operations
Banking On Backup

Hi, I want to migrate from the US to Mexico. Could you tell me about the rules and regulations?

Where can I find the lyrics of Jennifer Lopez's Waiting for tonight?

Beelzebub is a fictional monster. I want more information on the subject.

Jagdish Moorjani, (left) CEO, Transworks

Qualifications: Graduate, net savvy, with general awareness thrown in

Starting Salary: Rs 7,000-12,000 a month

Employment: 14,000 in 1999; 2,60,000 in 2008 (projection)

Revenue: Rs 680 crore in 1999; Rs 19,000 crore in 2008 (projection)

These are some queries that 22-year-old Nagesh Pai fields on an ordinary day. Staring at his computer, Pai provides quick solutions to people on the Internet with tools like search engines. He is part of the 275-strong back room operations team, or Internet-based customer interaction service unit, at the 18-month-old Transworks.

Transworks provides customer relationship management for a clutch of MNCs through a comprehensive repertoire of e-mail, live-chat and voice based customer service at its new office space in Andheri, suburban Mumbai.

Just as customer queries are increasing so is the potential of this ''back office business''. A NASSCOM and McKinsey study estimates that back office operations, revenue accounting and other ancillary services will employ 19,000 people in 2000-01, generating revenues of Rs 1,350 crore. Over the next seven years, 10 per cent of the work currently done in the US will be outsourced to India.

While Transworks, according to CEO Jagdish Moorjani, assures its clients ''low operating costs with the latest technology'', there are bottlenecks. ''An American customer,'' says Moorjani, ''will not understand problems like labour laws, water logging and power cuts. The tussle is between delivering high quality customer services and making government babus understand that I cannot go offline for even three minutes.'' Keep going.

-Himanshi Dhawan

MetroScape
Random Readings
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra would rather be "accurate" in his latest undertaking, a book of Kabir's poetry in English, even if he says "Kabir's greatest hits may not have been written by him at all".
more...

Looking Glass

Kolkata: Restaurant

Bangalore:
Art Exhibition

New Delhi: Play

Who says Indian theatre is dying? Playwrights--both veteran and budding--in the country had a chance to interact with those from the Royal Court Theatre, London, at its first residency workshop in Bangalore recently.
It was a fortnight
of enrichment, concludes Principal Correspondent Stephen David in Despatches.

"I was very much against the idea of India," says William Dalrymple, author, The City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi. In conversation with INDIA TODAY's Sonia Faleiro, he talks about his old girlfriend, Delhi and his "enormously exciting" next book, The White Moghuls in Interviews.