BPO: Bombay, Pune & then Others

With some multinationals preferring Pune over Mumbai for their offshore operations these days, the city is no longer a poor cousin of Mumbai.
But rather than compete against Mumbai to attract BPO operations, Pune will now be pitched in the global market as a unit of Mumbai.
The idea is to make Mumbai-Pune the biggest BPO hub in India. As per a Jones Lang LaSalle study, out of the total BPO businesses coming to India as of June 2003, Pune attracted around seven per cent, while Mumbai recorded 17 per cent.
"Most BPOs in Pune use horizontal skills set, which leaves no scope for specialisation.
Any other city in India can offer the same manpower," explains Deepak Shikarpur, IT chairman, Maratha Chamber of Commerce, Industries & Agriculture (MCCIA), "The fact that Pune is rich in human resources, which can help multinationals establish a vertical skills set-up, has not been explored."
The vertical skills that Shikarpur mentions are essentially of a higher level, which require programme development, designing, engineering, retailing and management. These require a qualitatively better workforce.
"In design and documentation, Pune has proved its global competency, as a number of Pune-educated engineers have made it abroad," elaborates A K Pathak, president,Computer Society of India (CSI), "Mumbai is already established in commercial sectors like banking, insurance and airlines.
Pune can be of strong support to Mumbai in research, design and application." Ramesh Sachdeva, chairman and managing director, DSS Systems & Software Technologies Ltd., believes that Pune should cash in on being Mumbai’s latest suburb. "The standard of life in Pune is high, the airport is connected to the city and in just two hours on the expressway, you reach Mumbai," he says, " Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon can be marketed as a cluster, so can Pune and Mumbai."
IT secretary for the Government of India, Kamalkan Jaiswal, believes that ‘second-metros’ are the future in India. "Pune’s proximity to Mumbai and educational infrastructure are its biggest benefits. Mumbai’s support systems are saturated and strained beyond limit," he says, "While the ITES sector grows at the rate of 65 per cent per annum now, second-level cities in India are the only option we can give multinationals."
The latest initiative of The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TIE) in Pune, regarding Pune’s potential to be the knowledge capital of India, was a step towards this goal. Says Pratima Kirloskar, president, TIE, Pune chapter, "We decided to exhibit Pune’s talent in biotech and pharma research to representatives of US, France, Italy and Austria, to give them the idea, that no matter what sector a multinational looks at, Pune has the best research background," she says, "Combined with the support from Mumbai, Pune becomes a quality deal for them," she asserts.