Women at the BPO

Jaipur, Aug. 22: Over 30 women furiously work on their computer keyboards in a single-storey building in Bagar, a dusty village in Rajasthan.

They are the force behind Source for Change — the state’s and perhaps India’s first all-woman BPO.

In a state steeped in tradition and where women have little role outdoors, the creation of Source for Change in the district of Jhunjhunu, 160km from Jaipur, is a silent revolution.

The 38 women working at the BPO have all passed at least Class X. Most of them had never seen a computer. Almost all had to brush up their English for the job.

“The only option for (educated) girls here was teaching, considered the safest bet in the job market. Nobody thought of anything else until the BPO came up and offered a computer-related job. Girls who had never seen a computer before are working here now after being adequately trained. This proves that rural girls are equally efficient as urban ones,” said Seema Kashimpuria, a trainer at the BPO.

Shrot Katewa, one of the mentors in the project, said: “The Piramals, leading drugmakers, hail from Jhunujhunu and the initial funding was done by Piramal Foundation, which is also one of our main clients. They wanted to do something for the region and decided to empower women and leverage the talent of rural women.”

That is how women like Kashimpuria, who had learnt computers for the heck of it, came into the picture. Kashimpuria had never imagined that the training would land her a job in her hometown.

Source for Change started work in September 2007 with a 10-member team and now employs 38 women, aged between 20 and 40.

Rajasthan has a female literacy rate of about 44 per cent according to the 2001 census. The only other rural BPO in the state is in Pilani.

Gagan Rana, a former municipal bond analyst with J.P. Morgan on Wall Street, Alim Haji, a former researcher with the US Air Force, and Katewa, a former BPO executive who hails from Bagar but was brought up in Mumbai, decided to get together and transfer technology to rural areas with focus on women. The project cost around Rs 16 lakh to be set up.

The organisation’s motive was to empower women by making them manage the entire BPO operation on their own.

There were initial hiccups in terms of training and getting clients. “It was difficult finding clients when we started as nobody believed in the work ethics of a rural BPO, let alone one run entirely by women. But our first work for Pratham, where we successfully completed a 19,200 form data-entry project within a record time of 21 days, becoming the highest quality data-entry provider among 20 BPOs, made our clients’ belief strong in us,” said Katewa.

Pratham, an NGO, has become a regular client.

Among the others are the Confederation of Indian Industry, which has a voice-based project, Delhi-based BPO Intouch Solutions, the Rajasthan government, BITS-Pilani, University of Maryland in the US and Indicorps.