Women bag a third of 30,000 BPO jobs created

NEW DELHI: The BPO Promotion Scheme started by the government in 2014 has created over 30,000 jobs, of which nearly a third have gone to women. The maximum number of jobs under this scheme have been created in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, data accessed by ET shows. According to a senior official, the government is planning an assessment of the scheme for analysing the employment generation aspect and the “sense of empowerment” of employees at the units, which were set up across the country with government subsidy. The scheme envisions incentivising setting up of 53,300 seats across the country by giving Rs 1 lakh per seat as viability gap funding to companies bidding to set up the BPOs. As per details available with ET, 30,321 jobs had been created by July 16 at 226 business process outsourcing (BPO) units operationalised across the country in 28 states. Of these, 10,072 jobs went to women. The maximum number of jobs — 9,100 — were created in Andhra Pradesh, followed by 5,878 in Tamil Nadu, 3,265 in Punjab, 1,781 in Odisha, 1,668 in Bihar, and 1,665 in Maharashtra. 70388312 Among the cities, maximum 5,006 jobs have been created in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh; 3,416 in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu; 3,254 in Mohali, Punjab; 1,988 in Guntupalli, Andhra Pradesh; 1,498 in Patna, Bihar; 1,193 in Ranchi, Jharkhand; and 1,183 jobs in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. Among the big states, West Bengal fared the worst under the scheme with only 141 jobs added under the BPO Promotion Scheme in the six cities identified for BPO units. The biggest state, Uttar Pradesh, could add only 949 jobs. According to the official cited earlier, the government has decided to ask a third party to do an evaluation of the scheme to look into the creation of the IT ecosystem in tier-2 and 3 cities and study the impact of the BPO promotion scheme on the IT sector. The evaluation is also aimed at reporting the gap areas and bottlenecks across states and to look into the potential of the scheme. A major objective is to get a “sense of the empowerment of employees of the BPO units”, as per a document seen by ET. The study will also look into the current outreach to the industry, the level of promptness extended to the BPO units, and the coordination between the Centre and states on this. The study will involve speaking to government functionaries, representatives of BPO companies as well as employees with senior, middle and junior management roles in these BPOs to assess their experience. Interviews and field surveys, too, will be carried out.

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