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THE recent US federal law against outsourcing American support services to foreign shores has invited a series of protests from sources in the Indian Government and the Indian corporate sector. Everyone wants to keep these BPO (business process outsourcing) jobs within India for a variety of reasons.

The most legitimate and valid concern comes from the Indian industry that provides almost 70 per cent of existing jobs through the BPO sector. According to the statistics provided by www.bpoindia.org, which derives its data from the likes of McKinsey and Co and The Gartner Group, as on March 31, 2003, the Indian BPO sector employed 1,71,000 professionals.

It has an investment of $1 billion, creating about 100,000 smart cubicles in 7.5 million square feet of space. It generated revenues of $2.3 billion in 2002-03.

India has the largest number of English-speaking college graduates in the world, thanks to its 250-year stint being the crown jewel of the British Empire.

A large number of young and skilled Indian citizens, between the age brackets of 21-27, work in the BPO industry catering to provide support services to foreign firms mainly from the United Kingdom and the United States.

The three-year-old US recession and the highest rate of unemployment (8.3 million Americans jobless per US Department of Labour Statistics as of January 2004) since the Great Depression of 1929 has had the US government hard pressed to act and alleviate some percentage of this unemployment. Moreover, this law applies to American companies using government contracts and funds only, for now.

The American private sector is not affected and companies like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle need not necessarily follow suit if the people they hire in India are through their own financial resources. The fear of the law applying across the board and including these corporations is what propels the Indian BPO sector to react in the way it has.

The second reason is merely political. Both India and the United States are in an election year.

In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government is banking on strong economy at home through foreign investment and industry to win the general elections. A dent in India's economic strength at this point could seriously hurt the ruling party's chances.

In the United States, President George W. Bush and the Republican Party have been under fire for the war in Iraq. The US economy is just officially out of recession and the Bush Government has yet to show a significant employment surge. More jobless Americans would mean fewer votes for the Republicans. The President is trying his best in the few months left to the presidential elections in November 2004 to limit the damage.

So, the BPO sector looked like the weakest spot to start with because there exists an equally skilled percentage of people in the United States who can do the job as effectively if not more, and who are currently jobless. In crying out against the backlash against the 70 per cent revenue producing BPO industry, the Indian government and industry have been continuously ignoring the remaining 30 per cent highly skilled bunch of technically qualified young Indians.

The neglect has reached a sorry state where engineering, commerce and arts graduates have been forced to opt for call centre jobs, simply because there exist little or no opportunity for these youngsters after professional school.

Since age 22 (on an average) when these kids graduate, they spend about 3-5 years in the BPO industry trying to make a living and are quite content with the compensation standards offered to them bearing in mind the fact that they have skills and experience limited to what they have learnt in school.

Little attention has been paid to providing an environment for technological research and development. On the initiative of the Karnataka government, Microsoft is setting up a 7,000-seat support centre in India to cater to 5.2 million worldwide users of Windows XP.

India needs a solid infrastructure in the fields of telecommunications, manufacturing, finance, education and the arts. The 'Nasscom-McKinsey Study: India IT Strategies' predicts the global market for IT-enabled services to be over $142 billion by 2008.

Of this, customer interaction services account for $33 billion, finance & accounting services $15 billion, engineering & design $1.2 billion, data search, integration & management $44 billion, remote education $18 billion and networking consulting and management $15 billion, among others. The United States and the likes would only find it lucrative and economical to invest in India in these core sectors for many reasons. The primary of them being the still prevalent lack of highly technical know-how in the US. By having the R&D outsourced, America stands to gain in monetary terms if global compensation standards and work environment quality can be duplicated in India.

Moreover, American and other foreign nationals can be employed wherever there is a deficit of highly skilled and experienced Indian labour, on short-term periods, to increase the global diversity of the workplace and the opportunity to Indians and foreigners to learn from each other. Learning is a two-way street. You impart and imbibe knowledge.