NEW DELHI: Nasscom, the apex industry association for software and service companies in
India, has submitted its recommendations to Department of Telecommunications, Government
of India (DoT) in order to remove certain procedural bottlenecks that are hampering growth
of the call center sector. Nasscom has also asked the DoT to review certain areas in the
licensing agreement for setting up of international and domestic call centers in India.
Nasscom's recommendations to the DoT include:
- Sharing of bandwidth for disaster recovery and mission critical applications between
multiple entities and redundancy - Call Center approval should not to be customer-specific
- Allowing ITES companies to set up their own gateways
- Sharing of bandwidth between multiple locations of a single entity and also within the
same group of companies - Internet & IPLC connectivity on same LAN
- Connectivity of a LAN in an international call center to a domestic ISP
Submitting the recommendations, Nasscom president, Kiran Karnik said "The
Government has done a lot in past one year in the area of telecom liberalization. However,
there are various licensing and connectivity issues in the ITES sector, which requires
policy amendments by the Government. It is imperative that the government encourages
sustained growth in this the sector by streamlining procedural bottlenecks and provide a
progressive policy framework to encourage investment."
"Today the licensing conditions for call centers and telecom regulations are being
compared with countries like Philippines, Mexico, Ireland etc. India ranks above these
countries in terms of manpower availability, however, telecom links and licensing
requirements for call centers can be a stumbling block for proposed back-office
investments in India"
"We have taken a holistic view of the issues related to call center licensing in
collaboration with major players in this space and have submitted our recommendations to
DoT. The objective of providing these recommendations is to ensure that there is a level
playing field, transparency and ease of operations in the call center sector", he
further added.