Guwahati, July 29: The Union ministry of electronics and information technology today said the Northeast business process outsourcing (BPO) promotion scheme started last year has made good progress.

The scheme had a budget of Rs 50 crore for generating 5,000 shifts of BPO operators in the Northeast of which 1,610 shifts have been allotted.

In the BPO industry, a shift means a team of three BPO operators who will work for eight hours every day. Ideally, a BPO unit has three shifts to operate 24 hours.

A BPO is a third party service provider that handles specific business tasks outsourced from other business units on a contract basis.

"The motive behind the promotion scheme was to provide Rs 1 lakh incentive to the BPO units for each shift. A total of Rs 50 crore was allotted to start 5,000 shifts of BPOs within three years that will generate at least 15,000 employments in the region. So far, 1,610 shifts have been allotted and already generated 1,200 jobs and will generate 1,500 more in the next three months. If the allotment goes on at this rate, we will be able to complete the target within 2018," Omkar Rai, director-general of Software Technology Parks of India, the wing of the ministry responsible to implement the scheme nationwide, told the media here this afternoon.

Of the allotted shifts, Assam has two BPO units that have 810 shifts while Nagaland has 400, Manipur 150, Meghalaya 200 and Arunachal Pradesh 50. "We are also targeting Tripura and Mizoram and helping them set up BPO units in the next three months. We want these BPO units to become small centres of excellence where trained youths will operate who in turn will be capable of becoming entrepreneurs and act as multipliers in job creation," Rai said.

Today, Thredz Information Technology, a Hyderabad-based company, opened a BPO unit with 50 trained personnel.