Fostera : India's Rural BPO

He was selling puppies till a year ago in the backward Krishnagiri district of Tamil Nadu. But when India’s first rural BPO, Fostera, set up shop on a narrow lane at Sanasandiram village in his district, R Muraliraj turned into a confident ‘call centre guy.’ “I am a higher secondary graduate but could not speak English at all when I came here,” he smiles, putting on his headphones to talk to ICICI customers in Guntur in Andhra Pradesh in fluent English. It may be the hour of recession and lay-offs, but the government-run BPO is on a hiring spree. Multi-national telecom and banking companies are knocking on the doors of Fostera at Sanasandiram to outsource their help desk, loan collection, credit card processing, form-filling, insurance and editing work. Over the next three months, Fostera (short for fostering rural technology), floated by the Krishnagiri district administration over a year ago, will hire about 500 young people from Tamil Nadu’s hinterlands for monthly salaries ranging from Rs 5,000 to Rs 8,000. The BPO, which was working just one shift, is switching to three shifts a day to manage the tide of offers, says Fostera CEO MR Ashok Kumar. Daughters and sons of agricultural and construction labourers, who have barely passed high school, will soon put on headphones and work the helplines for bank and insurance customers in English, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada. About 300 young people have already been put through voice and non-voice training. “We look for youth with the right attitude and high energy levels. Communication skills can be instilled, but attitude cannot be taught,” he says. Fostera, which is presently a 25-seater facility, will soon start two more call centres in Uthangarai taluk in Krishnagiri district, each with a capacity of 75. In Uthangarai taluk, which has high unemployment and illiteracy rates, marriage halls are being converted into BPOs, providing jobs for those above 18 who have finished school. When IT major Microsoft recently undertook a pilot project on online electoral roll registration in Tamil Nadu, it chose to use Fostera’s BPO employees. “Though from a rural background, their hunger for learning is amazing. They grasped the data entry applications within 10 to 15 minutes,” says Govind Kanshi, architect advisor of Microsoft India.