| Headline: NYPD parks tickets in Baroda Source: Euromoney Date: May 2001 On a trip to Baroda, a dusty, remote town in western India, a senior executive from a multinational in Mumbai was astonished to find a small IT company that processes parking tickets for the New York Police Department. IT enabled services or remote contact services, such as call centres, medical transcription companies and back-office data processing companies, are mushrooming in the unlikeliest nooks of India. “This is a $390 billion market that India can tap into,” says Amitabh Kumar, director of operations at Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd, the state-owned telecoms provider. VSNL’s move to cut rates and increase India’s bandwidth over the past year will help this industry, one constrained only by the availability of good telecommunications services, to grow enormously. These IT companies are a fairly easy play for investors and entrepreneurs, often turning profits after a few months of setting up shop. Take a small company called InfoWavz, set up and funded by ICICI, an Indian bank listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It runs a 200-seat call centre out of a Mumbai suburb that services customers of a health company, a fitness equipment manufacturer and a mortgage company in the US. |