India’s Outsourcing Blues
After eight months in a high-paying business process outsourcing job, 21-year-old Anurag Verma’s life metamorphosed completely. The onetime middle-class, bus-commuting college kid was earning big money, had acquired a flashy new car and a Blackberry and was dreaming of investing in a condominium.
His euphoria was short lived. A vortex of stress, late-night shifts and sleep deprivation whittled down his weight by 10 kilograms in a few months and triggered migraines, dizzy spells and killed his appetite. One day, Verma collapsed at his desk from exhaustion, raising panic among his colleagues.
This is the flip side of an outsourcing revolution that has legions of alarmed office workers terrified of losing their jobs in the west. Verma isn’t an aberration. Far too many of India’s youth are being sucked into a work culture that promises one thing and delivers quite another. Indeed, behind the promise of a good salary (about US$800 per month, India’s average salary for a whole year), outsourcing jobs involve grueling work schedules straddling multifarious time zones and cultures, tight deadlines, ambitious targets, phones that never stop ringing and rude and demanding callers.
Cumulatively, this is spiraling into a burnout phenomenon for many of India’s 7 million-plus outsourcing workers. The industry calls it BOSS — Burn Out Stress Syndrome. According to doctors, BOSS affects a third of call center workers with symptoms that include chronic fatigue, insomnia, alteration of biorhythms, loss of appetite, gastrointestinal problems and others. Physical problems like back pain and shoulder pain are also common and — with excessive exposure to computers, headphones and other such equipment — many ear and eye-related ailments.
This was a scenario just waiting to unfurl. Over the past few years, India has been the epicenter of outsourcing as multinationals across the world farm out services and back-office operations in sectors including travel, education, hospitality, audit and accounts to India’s plentiful, highly skilled, English-speaking and cheap workforce.
That has resulted in impressive industry growth, rising by 40 percent this fiscal year alone to achieve US$8.5 billion turnover against $6.3 billion in fiscal year 2005-06. According to a recent NASSCOM-Everest survey, India’s outsourcing sector will earn $11 billion in export revenues next year and is poised to be a $50 billion-enterprise by 2012.
