Coming to India: Over 1 lakh BPO jobs!

Business process outsourcing and call centre jobs are increasingly being sent to low-wage nations by American firms, but the nation to register highest growth in BPO jobs will be India, says Datamonitor, a London-based research firm.

Datamonitor says that of the 110,000 jobs outsourced from one country to another, at the end of last year, 63,000 of those jobs came to India.

The research firm says that the total number of call centre jobs to be outsourced by 2007 is likely to increase to 241,000. Of these, about 121,000 jobs will come to India.

Although American call centres are not in danger of being wiped out, Datamonitor says that the expansion of the industry would have hit a dead end. Once flourishing, call centres now are dwindling, a trend that is already threatening thousands of jobs.

Currently, there are about 50,600 American call centres employing about 2.9 million people. Datamonitor expects the number of US call centres to fall to 47,500 by 2008, with 2.7 million employees.

An American call centre worker is paid about $10 an hour, while for the same job a worker in India is paid $1.20 an hour.

Employees of the US Department of Labor hold posters while they protest during a rally outside the Labor Department in Washington, DC. The rally was held to against the Bush Administration's policy of contracting out and privatizing US jobs. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

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