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India diary: Day ten - A classic offshoring facility
Feng shui waterfalls, a BPO centre and the Indian Prime Minister...

By Andy McCue

Published: Wednesday 30 June 2004

silicon.com reporter Andy McCue was on assignment in India from 14 to 23 April investigating offshoring efforts in Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and New Delhi. This is his diary. Articles and commentary on IT offshoring and BPO in India and elsewhere will be appearing on silicon.com over the coming weeks. You can find them all here.

22/4/04: During dinner at the sumptuous five-star Oberoi Hotel Chinese restaurant, I meet with Aparna Viswanathan, an American lawyer who represents multinational corporations in India. She is quite critical of the quality of Indian service in some segments of the BPO market and says she herself wouldn't want her bank's customer service to be done from India.

Viswanathan is also not convinced by the figures quoted by bodies like Nasscom about the endless supply of Indian graduates who go on to work in the tech sector and the call centres – she claims only a third actually have the right level of English language speaking skills to do the work properly.

23/4/04: The final day of my Indian journey takes me to the high-tech area outside New Delhi I haven't seen yet, Noida, about 20 km from the city. (I described my visit to the other area, Gurgaon, in yesterday's diary piece.) The journey there is pleasant - a drive on an empty toll motorway that cuts through a landscape of green paddy fields.

My first meeting is with Saurabh Srivastava, executive chairman of Xansa India. Xansa has several high-profile customers serviced from India including Thames Water and Barclaycard. After an interview with the chain-smoking exec, I'm given a tour of the two facilities Xansa has here.

Xansa's main operations are in Chennai and, like everyone else, all talk is about expansion. The new Xansa building here is state of the art with an emphasis on creating a pleasant working environment. The place has been feng shuid - a waterfall in the gardens outside the building is supposed to bring luck - and the grounds are landscaped with modern decking that Alan Titchmarsh and the BBC Ground Force team would be proud of.

Each floor has individual areas set out to service each of its customers. This is the most typical example I've seen on my trip of how people in the UK would imagine offshore facilities to look like.

Many well-known UK firms are serviced here – signs bearing their names hang in each team area – but I'm not allowed to mention them for reasons of commercial confidentiality. Companies are clearly still sensitive about the public reaction to offshoring work to India.

On the way back into town I notice big green battered buses churning out clouds of black fumes, all emblazoned with the logo 'propelled by clean fuel'. The taxi driver explains that some buses are basically hired out to drivers in the morning for a fee. They then race around the city all day packing in as many passengers as possible to make their money back.

After a meeting with Wipro Spectramind CEO Raman Roy, it's time to catch a plane back to Mumbai.

We land at Mumbai's domestic airport but are not allowed to 'de-plane', as the (now former) prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is on the plane behind us. In India everything stops when the PM is around – the roads close and we're not allowed off until he's on his way.

I spend my last few rupees on an ice-cold Kingfisher beer at the tacky '70s style restaurant at Mumbai International Airport before catching the flight back to London.