small scale BPOs ?

I was quite impressed by my school friend when he started his own 'small scale' BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) centre, which is first of its kind in Calicut.

Calicut is relatively a small town and there are no big industries except for educational institutions like IIM, NIT and the medical college.. Last time I went home, I decided to visit my friend Maneef's computer sales shop. As we talked along, he took to me to his small enterprise - a room with a network of 10 computers with young girls and boys employed by him to do IT work for a client in Bangalore.

The system works this way - there are few companies in Bangalore which takes contract to analyse surveys taken by different companies. The forms are paper copies which are filled by public for various matters. If there are 2 lakh paper forms, it is impossible for anybody to get information out of them within a given time frame.Hence there are softwares to take the scanned soft copy of the form to collect the data by matching the fields in the form It is a simple job but time is most important as the data has to reach the concerned firm immediately.

What my friend does is quite simple - he takes the scanned form from a company in Bangalore and with the help of his employed boys and girls, he collects the data out of the form, send it back to the company. He process nearly 600-1000 forms daily and he is paid for that.

I was just wondering if some similar effort is taken to divert unskilled IT jobs away from hubs like Bangalore where operational costs are higher to small towns like Calicut where the costs are much lower, there is certainly a chance for 'Rural Delivery Model' !!