Posted 11:55am (Mla time) Mar 21, 2005 By Uttara Choudhury Agence France-Presse
CHANDIGARH, India -- US personal computer giant Dell Inc. opened a new call center on Monday in the northern Indian state of Punjab which will give jobs to 1,500 graduates and computer engineers, a company official said.
The US firm carried out a survey of 19 Indian cities before building the large facility in Mohali, on the outskirts of Punjab's state capital Chandigarh.
"We looked at 19 cities but eventually decided to take a bet on Chandiagrh as it has a large population of young, educated people who have good accents," said Romi Malhotra, managing director of Dell India.
"We have hired 300 people and my feeling is that we will get together 1,500 people very quickly to fill this Dell customer contact center this year. Chandigarh should be able to support the talent we are looking for," he added.
India has been called the "backoffice" of the world, with some 2,000 foreign firms outsourcing their operations to the country to take advantage of its vast pool of educated and less expensive English-speaking workforce.
About 800,000 graduates and professionals are employed in the outsourcing and technical support industries.
Analysts have warned, however, that India may lose its strong grip on the multi-billion dollar outsourcing industry if it does not brush up on its spoken English.
Dell brushed aside the fuss about foreign accents and said the US firm enjoyed big cost savings by shipping out customer care, technical support and back office jobs to India.
"The center in Mohali will be our third customer contact center in India and so as far as we are concerned the experiment has worked and worked well," said Malhotra.
"How much effort does it take to neutralize an accent which may have inflections of the mother tongue? India has enough graduates with technical apbreastude and good communication skills," he added.
Dell opened up its first call center in India in the southern technology hub of Bangalore in 2001 and had a second one up and running in another southern city, Hyderabad, two years later.
Be careful not to call it outsourcingMarch 21, 2005 When Ramnath Reddy uses the word outsourcing, his colleague Michael Fernandes quickly corrects him. We're sitting around a coffee table in the lobby of the Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel, during...
Michael Dell, chairman of Dell Inc., was to fly into India on his private jet later Monday to take part in the celebrations for the new center.
