Nasscom Foundation, the social development trust of Nasscom, the country’s apex IT industry body, is working towards developing a new arm of the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry called ‘impact sourcing’ in India, according to its chief executive officer Rita Soni.
Impact sourcing, a term coined by Rockefeller Foundation, involves employing socio-economically disadvantaged people with limited opportunity for sustainable employment as principal workers in BPO centres to provide information-based services at prices that are, in most cases, almost 40 per cent lower than the traditional BPO centres.
“The deep dive that we have done in the business responsibility arena recently is our new initiative – Impact Sourcing. It is all about BPOs that employ excluded communities, especially those fully run by women or manned by disabled people, from rural areas. We have been researching on the new area for the past six months to see how such an industry can grow in the country. We have just started working on this in partnership with Rockefeller Foundation,” Soni told Business Standard.
Rockefeller Foundation is exploring the impact sourcing space as a potential market for rural India as well as for sub-Saharan Africa, and Nasscom’s partnership with Rockefeller would be more of a win-win game rather than competition between the two countries, she added.
According to Soni, Rockefeller Foundation would support the Nasscom arm in identifying and filling the gaps, especially in training the unemployed from the hinterlands, besides creating various types of certifications. “We currently have the Nasscom Assessment of Competence (NAC) certification, which is of higher level. But we need something a little bit smaller for BPOs in rural locations,” she added.
Nasscom Foundation, along with Rockefeller, has identified some routes to scale up impact sourcing in the country, including learning from the mainstream BPOs, enabling impact sourcing service providers (the entities that do impact sourcing) to get sub-contracts from mainstream BPOs and piggybacking on e-governance activities like digitising records.
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Quoting the Nasscom-McKinsey Perspective 2020 report that estimated that the Indian IT-BPO industry could tap additional revenue streams worth $75 billion by 2020 through innovation, Soni, however, says Nasscom found the growth being really constrained by capacities.
“We have a dozen players (rural BPOs) in the industry, probably employing around 6,000 people right now. This is incredibly small, especially when you look at the mainstream BPO industry. What is happening is that the IT industry itself is made up of migrants in many ways -- people coming from Tier-II, Tier-II and Tier-IV towns in order to work in mainstream BPOs -- and many of whom are are wanting to go back. Some of the impact sourcing service providers are actually targeting this population,” she said.