'We are our own worst enemies'

LUNCH WITH BS/RAMAN ROY

The only unfortunate thing about this lunch with Raman Roy is that we didn't get to eat at the place he really wanted to. That would have been a favourite dhaba that makes, he says, the best butter chicken in the world.

That we wound up in Park Royal's Empress of China, was partly because of my ignorance of this wish "" "I love food," he'd told me, so I'd blithely suggested a trendy Mediterranean restaurant. In the event, the Nehru Place five-star proved conveniently close to Roy's Okhla office.

It was a pity, because Empress of China fare is aggressively spiced with monosodium glutamate. But the setting was probably more conducive to a longish interview than a dhaba.

Roy walks in just as I've slow-sipped my way through a fresh lime "" he'd been stuck in one of Delhi's perennial traffic jams. As he orders a Diet Coke, I ask him how he'd managed to get away for lunch when phone-calls always find him busy, busy, busy. He's happy about that, of course. "At the moment, interest levels are so high that in a week we cater to more than 10 companies. That is why getting away at lunch-time is easy, dinner-time is not because that's when we have our customers."

Despite the vociferous backlash in the US "" the biggest of the six geographies Wipro Spectramind serves "" it turns out that that's where the incremental demand is coming from. So no, he wasn't too worried about the anti-India sentiments. "The backlash is real, people are talking about it, but does it mean companies are not moving "" that's not true," he says.

Roy is to the Indian BPO industry what Narayana Murthy is to Indian software, but it would be difficult to label him as such if you didn't know. His manner is a combination of expressive boyish enthusiasm and earthy business sense "" and he's also awfully angry about many things.

For the moment, he deals patiently with the question that all Indian BPO providers are asked: whether they are moving up the value chain fast enough. He thinks they are.

Wipro Spectramind, he says, ran a project for a company "where we were creating and quality checking a genomics database where each of the people I had working on it were PhDs in molecular biology. In terms of lesser mortals like me, I couldn't understand the content of that database. But it was profitable for us and worthwhile for our customers because they couldn't get those competencies at that price anywhere."

The reason these projects don't attract notice, he explains, is that volumes are small though per unit profitability is high. Also, the journey up the value chain is a function of the tenure of a BPO provider's customers. Wipro Spectramind, which was bought by software giant Wipro in 2000, is just 44 months and seven days old.

We break off to order: Peking Duck for starters and heavy-duty non-vegetarian fare "" stir-fried prawn in cashewnut and crispy-fried lamb with (for our conscience) vegetable fried rice. While we order, he tells me about his daughters, aged six and 12, on whom he clearly dotes. They call him appa, the Tamil word for father, which I tell him is strange for a Bengali family.

It turns out Roy is not Bengali at all, but Punjabi. But with a surname like Roy... I queried, disappointed that I wouldn't get the parochial pleasure of chattering to him in my mother tongue. He explains that his father was Roy-Kapoor. "But we dropped the Kapoor so Roy stuck. And Roy is a bastardisation of Rai Sahab, which was the title given by the British to my grandfather." As for appa, his daughter heard a friend call her father that, liked it and the term stuck.

Even more interestingly, if it hadn't been for partition, Raman Roy may never have strayed into the BPO business. His is a common Partition story, of wealthy grandparents who lost everything when they locked up their house and worldly goods in Lahore and came to India never thinking the country would be divided.

The trolley for the Peking Duck is wheeled up, Roy asks for chopsticks and continues his story. "Then Partition happened, my grandparents couldn't go back, and from lords they became paupers. If it hadn't happened, I would probably be sitting and measuring cloth because I would have gone into the family business "" that is the way the next generation went."

Instead, he became a chartered accountant "" and even this brought him close to his inherited profession once. "We used to do the audit of Raymonds and one of the things we had to do was stock-checking "" basically measuring how much cloth was in stock. That is when my dad pointed out to me, 'Beta, if Partition hadn't happened, you would have done this!'"

The Peking Duck is served. It's strictly okay, but luckily the conversation makes up for the food. Roy's entry into the BPO space was just as accidental. In the early nineties, he had been part of the team at American Express that launched the corporate card and dollar card. It was a small business but the cost per transaction in India was low.

Initially, headquarters did not believe the numbers they were seeing on the India office's monthly report and sent the comptroller to check what was going on. When he arrived, it took just three hours to figure out that Amex India wasn't botching things up.

Some six months later, after Amex set up a committee to evaluate where it should set up a centre, India was selected and Roy would be business leader (Roy's reaction: "I thought, holy shit, will it work?").

Twelve years later, Roy can well say holy shit, it's worked "" having been responsible, after his stint in Amex, for setting up two of the biggest call centres , GE and Wipro Spectramind.

Despite the struggle, Roy clearly wouldn't alter that experience for anything. "We've had a blast all these years," he says. So why, I ask as the next course arrives, don't more domestic companies opt for BPO ?

I've touched a raw nerve, it seems, and it's all to do with unhelpful government policy. As Roy explains it, "I cannot use the same switch on which I do international calls for domestic calls because the government fears that I may start doing the work that MTNL or VSNL does.

"Now in the Philippines, my competitors can cater to both local and international markets, they don't have what I can call a 'silly' law, so they can defray their cost by daytime work. So it becomes a big issue that we, as a market, have to tackle."

Roy's larger point is that Indian BPO providers operate an uneven playing field vis-à-vis global competitors on several counts. One: power. "We don't get power for more than 15 to 18 hours, so I have to run a back-up." Two: transport. "We run a mini transport company of some 1,000 vehicles to ferry our staff. Why can't we run night trains? We have to wake up to the fact that the competition is not within India but in Malaysia and the Philippines."

To illustrate, he gives this example. "In our business, the customer will oscillate for six months before deciding. Once they decide they want to go into production next month. Let's say they take 200 seats. In the Philippines you can make a phone-call and buy the computers.

In India, much as Compaq, Dell, HP and so on are willing to sell to me, I can't buy locally. To get my duty-free goods as per law, I have to import. I had gone to the government and said, Arre, woh bonded godown me kharid sakte hai. But they said no, you have order, give us the machine order, which flight it's come on... So it takes me three weeks to get the computers in, if I'm lucky."

His voices rises a notch in irritation. "So what do I do? I still have to compete. So, when the order is near fruition, I buy the machines. So at any time I have 200 to 300 seats available."

Then, he complains, telecom rates are "out of whack. We pay 2x of what they pay in the Philippines or Malaysia." He's also got complaints about real estate rules, tax policies and the lack of a coherent education plan.

"As a company, I have a gameplan of what I want to do. But as a country, do we? The Philippines get half-readymade resources. If they can transfer a person that they hire into a global resource in two weeks, I take six weeks. Why? Because they've fine-tuned the education system to teach them in a class some of the things that I, as Wipro Spectramind, have to teach them."

In short, "we are our own worst enemies". Roy is upbeat about the future of the industry and its direct and indirect employment potential but unsure whether policy will allow India to maximise that opportunity. "Which other industry is going to create so many jobs in the next five years? Zero!"

Roy says India is already losing customers to the Philippines. I tell him that a consultant had predicted that we'd lose to China too. "In my opinion, not in the next three to five years. In the long term? Guaranteed!"

The main course ends and both Roy's passionate criticism of government policy and the heavy food leave just enough space for a single espresso for him and jasmine tea for me. Roy generously offers his discount card so that "you don't have to pay for me".

Tomorrow is the weekend when his daughters take over his day from waking to sleeping. On Sunday, they're taking him to see a hit Hindi movie "" he can't recall the name ("it's got four words").

My unawareness doesn't help. Later I check with colleagues who say it was probably Kal ho na ho "" which translates loosely as "Will tomorrow come?" In the context of what Roy has just told me about the BPO business, it's an appropriate title.