MOHALI: In the past five years, more than 100,000 young Indian graduates from small cities have made the move to Bangalore, or the suburban New Delhi city of Gurgaon, to answer calls from credit card holders, make sales pitches or maintain records. But late hours far from home led to high staff turnover and companies found that a good salary was not enough to attract employees who were increasingly eager to return to small-town India.
- So companies such as Texas-based Dell Computers and India's second largest software firm Infosys Technologies are now moving out to where the staff are, rather than luring staff to the big cities, building state-of-the-art offices in remote parts India .
- "I was hating every minute of my call centre job in New Delhi," says Sanjeev Rana, 22-year-old employee at US publishing software firm Quark's call centre at Mohali, close to Punjab and Haryana state capital Chandigarh. "I barely got four hours sleep between shifts and meals were at dingy roadside restaurants. So when I got a job opportunity in my hometown, I grabbed it," he adds.
Now Mohali, a city of 200,000 people, is sprouting glass and chrome buildings -- filled with workers including 300 people handling calls for Dell. Only a few miles away in Chandigarh, a city of one million, Infosys is building a new centre for 10,000 employees, while global firms IBM and Convergys are also eyeing bases in what was once a sleepy city of mostly retired people.
Companies like Quark take extra steps to keep people happy in small towns by providing swimming pools and movies to attract staff from nearby as well as from the big cities. "We not only have a zero attrition rate, but we are reversing the migration trend. Graduates from Delhi are coming here. Our compensation package is not just about money, but a better lifestyle," Atul Gupta, vice president of Global Support Services, Quark India, says.
He says the company opened the centre after it realised thousands of students were graduating from technical and other colleges from nearby Chandigarh, capital of the northern states of Haryana and Punjab, and heading off to Delhi or Bangalore for work.
Industry officials say the trend of outsourcing to smaller cities has eased the stress among employees and reduced turnover for employees who work through the night.
