Recession bites – An Unexplored Opportunity for India!!!

The current slowdown in the United States which has caused a Global recession phenomena lately has caused the other countries to relook their policies and their customer base. The so-called off-shoring companies in India, which just had either American customers or which just do plain BPO services are the ones bearing the brunt. There have been loads of cost-cutting initiatives in all the companies, with some even performing the brutal act of laying people off. Of course, we are all humans, and being one of them, I am both afraid of the change and sympathetic for the deserving people who lose their jobs; yet I believe, that since we have come to a point where we cannot escape the change, looking at the positives that are bound to happen with this revolution needs to be figured out.

More KPO instead of BPO

KPO or Knowledge Process Outsourcing has been a new buzz-word since a few years now, with plain old “Call Center” giving way to some of the important processes being outsourced. The work outsourced is not as simple as just replacing the B with a “K”, Knowledge process can be defined as high added value processes chain where the achievement of objectives is highly dependent on the skills, domain knowledge and experience of the people carrying out the activity.

The future of KPO has a high potential as it is diversified across various sectors like Legal Processes, Intellectual Property and Patent related services, Engineering Services, Web Development application, CAD/CAM Applications, Business Research and Analytics, Legal Research, Clinical Research, Publishing, Market Research (Market research KPO ) etc. The current global recession will usher these more important and also more specialized activities to be outsourced as the organizations in the developed countries try to cut their costs further.

There are various segments of KPO which are on the rise in India. The American doctors send scanned copies of reports to their counterparts in India and medical consultation is done. Apart from this, various companies plan to follow Biocon way for their Research Process Outsourcing as per Kiran Shaw. The other backend services like Payroll and Human Resource Management are already in place, but the one segment that would be benefitted immensely by the recession seems to be LPO.

LPO – The current Outsourcing Boom???Though initially treated with mis-trust, the Law Firms in United States have finally started delegating the drafting and the other paper work to their subsidiaries in India. The Wall-Street crisis brought a wind-fall in this nascent industry because the crisis that impacted the fortunes of Indian IT firms has the country’s LPOs minting bundles of cash with huge amount of litigation work coming their way from the US. With a lot of paperwork needed for filing bankruptcies, lawsuits, mergers and acquisitions that the global recession is bringing forth, the Indian LPOs are getting more and more involved into the so-called critical tasks of the companies. Also, with the E-discovery law in place, (this law is related to storage, usage and analysis of electronic data for the litigation work) the American Law firms are flocking to India because of the huge cost differential in lawyer fees.

What is also an icing on the cake is the fact that the rising economic crunch is sending new workload offshore, whereas since India has a huge number of lawyers graduating every year, and since India performs its legal proceedings in English, and also Indian Legal System is crudely based on the British Laws, the Indian Lawyers are almost instantly employable for the LPO jobs.

Of course, the law firms are still debating as to how much of the work/ data can be effectively outsourced to India, especially considering that the information of the clients or the case may be confidential, but some of the simpler tasks like drafting and document reviews are being sent to India in a larger amount. A few of the law firms also commented that ever since the fall of Lehmann Brothers, their work has almost doubled and there has been a lot of hiring in different cities as the bubble burst is still happening and hence the demand is on the high.

Mass Layoffs – A Blessing in Disguise???

For years, we Indians have been hard-wired to live a methodical life of studying and finding a well paying job in a reputed MNC and settle down in life. The mass layoffs that follow this recession will shake the whole system up and we will have to awaken from this “dream-world”. Considering that a huge mass of good educated people, i.e. Engineers, Managers, Doctors etc. suddenly become unemployed, people will start to look at the other opportunities that would have been overlooked. New innovations may occur which will change the way we perceive the world and probably, some Indian will spawn yet-another MNC, an Indian MNC.

These issues may also make people more interested in teaching, which for now is considered a “dull” occupation and hence the next generation of students will be guided better. A bunch of people may even enter into Politics and we may see a lot of changes in various other segments and scenarios. The dark side is the crime rates will also go on a high and how we cope with the question of how to feed the hungry people is going to be tough to answer.

With the terror on the high, production on a low and the global recession bound to stay; I see a REVOLUTION on the cards, when and what will happen; Only Time Can Tell!!!