The arrest of Sanjay Kedia and the sealing of the Xponse premises were a nightmare come true for the government and the IT sector. The industry may well worry about the damage companies like Xponse can do to its image and the effects of the proposed strictures in the wake of the Kedia episode. The plight of the Xponse employees, particularly that of the call-centre operatives, is ironic. In an industry with an alarmingly high attrition rate, these are professionals who are being forced out of a job when most of them had not yet decided to quit.

Call centres operate on the classic communicative premise of mutual understanding. For inbound BPOs, the agent must understand the customer and must make himself understood. However, the goal of understanding is not consensus, goodwill or enlightenment. All the talk that ensues is strategic action, aimed at success, and not really at understanding in the broader sense of the term. The call-centre operative talks and often endures abuse to satisfy the person at the other end of the line. His success on this count satisfies his boss, which, in turn, satisfies the BPO’s client firm. Positioned on this cycle, the agent deals with two sets of customers — the internal ‘customer’ or the boss, and the external ‘customer’ or the voice over the phone. The agent is often in conflict with both.

Charlie Chaplin’s body in Modern Times is a microcosm of industrial ills, every twitching inch having imbibed the malaise of the mechanization and the de-humanization of the worker. Discussion of this de-humanization had become passé under the impact of globalization until globalization’s darling, the tertiary sector, itself began to manifest symptoms of the old disease. With variations in degree and kind, BPOs tend to show a pattern in the problems affecting employees. Much more than the rest of the services sector, the call centre seems to first impact on the physical, and then the psychological, health of the employees. The newly-christened phenomenon of ‘lifestyle diseases’ has hit the IT and the IT-enabled services sectors the hardest, forcing the Union health ministry to step in to study the problem and advise BPO managements. Sleeping disorders and insomnia, gastrointestinal problems, eyesight and hearing impairments are the commonest complaints among call centre operatives. In fact, for approximately 35-38 per cent of BPO employees annually surveyed, trouble starts with the inability to get adequate sleep. The BPO industry in India suffers the most on the “graveyard shift” that stays attuned to timings in the United States of America. Work-timings, coupled with long working hours, produce an abnormal level of stress.

Although human resource departments of many firms have secured the services of consultant psychiatrists to help these young people have a grip on their lives, very few have actually warmed up to the idea of confidentiality in the procedure. Psychiatrists, however, think in-house HR counselling is inadequate. Most of the advice that comes from the HR departments is concerned more with stress manifesting itself in reduced business output than with the issue of human suffering.

On a typical working day at a BPO, operatives often cannot manage even a toilet break between consecutive calls. Around 12-14 hours in a sedentary position, a high call volume and callers’ spite take their eventual toll. There is again the problem of the assumed identity. An average call-centre employee in India suffers a culture shock on entering the workspace and on adopting a fictitious name. Accents picked up hurriedly and artificially over six months are dropped off. Taking as many calls as possible while keeping individual call time low, and yet satisfying the customer and conforming to performance-measuring metrics is not easy even for veterans. Not surprisingly, there is a sharp increase in the proportion of non-voice-based services provided to overseas client firms. Companies like GE and Wipro, which have a greater proportion of non voice-based services, are looking for commerce graduates, chartered accountants, engineers and lower-end programmers.

Meanwhile, in Calcutta itself, there has been a steady deterioration in the quality of trainees. A director of an ITES training institute in the city claims that almost 80 per cent of the candidates currently available for training are only Bengali-speaking. Most English-educated graduates in eastern India are no longer interested in call-centre jobs. The reason appears to be the growing awareness of the drawbacks of BPOs. But ITES in Calcutta is actually a mass-market industry for the local youth, unlike in Gurgaon or Bangalore. The prospect of a decrease in the share of voice-based international services is being countered by the growth of the domestic market. Monolingual BPO employees fit the bill perfectly for domestic client firms, although the latter tend to pay less. It is a market less stringent about the quality of the agent’s English and it has standard Indian work schedules. Taking note of the domestic market, BPOs servicing overseas clients are also shifting to healthier Britain and Australia timings while slashing the volume of US clients.

An industry expected to support about 1.5 per cent of India’s population by 2010 will remain an economic necessity. But the human tragedy enacted in the BPO sector may not end so soon. Given his compulsions, a young graduate is likely to put up with an unkind situation. Few prospects of advance and little upward mobility hold the employees in a double bind. Take the Xponse operatives. They cannot seek work outside the industry. Yet their employer’s reputation would continue to hinder their re-employment. BPO employees fear not only a hire-and-fire policy but also the ever-changing nature of the industry that expects all those involved to keep pace. Nevertheless, as the Calcutta scene goes, the very spectre of change may ultimately offer less demanding assignments .