e-Revolution (online): Looking beyond metros

CHANDIGARH, INDIA: As the growth story of India Inc. kept on unfolding, it's now time for the stakeholders to pay serious attention towards creating and upgrading resources and infrastructure that will power India’s growth story for the next level.

Time has arrived when India is no longer just an emerging market, but it’s standing at the threshold of further evolution. Its now time to build and position India as a mature market with dynamic growth opportunities.

This was what the theme of today’s first plenary session of e-Revolution 2009. Moderated by Rajdeep Sehrawat, VP, Nasscom the session witnessed experts like Tanmoy Chakrabarty, VP & Head of Global Government Industry Group – TCS, Sumit Bhattacharya, EVP – HCL Technologies Ltd (BPO) and Manish Bhatt of Airtel discuss how to tap the unexplored yet potential growth areas of the country and building excellence to promote India as a leading economy through IT and telecom.

BPO has been one of the biggest success stories that India Inc. produced. Renewed efforts are being undertaken by the BPO sector to enable its rapid future growth that could help it reach about $30 billion dollar in export revenue by 2012. To build on that growth, it is essential to tap young and quality talents across the country and create value resources.

As Bhattacharya suggests, this is not just important for large corporate but equally important for medium businesses where attracting and retaining specialized talents is a challenge. “This will be particularly relevant now as labor arbitrage is almost on the verge of ending,” added Bhattacharya.

Considering on the saturation of Tier 1 cities and their high attrition rate and higher cost of living, Chakraborty suggested the importance of industries to invest and build business infrastructure in smaller cities.

In addition to creating infrastructure Chakraborty emphasized on the importance to build on quality raw material of which the most important is human resource. “Chandigarh, Nagpur, Jaipur are the future, and so they need to have the relevant infrastructure. Chandigarh is already there, rest should come up too,” quipped Chakraborty.