Introducing SourcePilani, a company that is bringing the concept of BPO to rural India, starting off from the small town of Pilani in Rajasthan.

SourcePilani provides high quality and low cost BPO services by leveraging the hitherto untapped talent that rural India has to offer to the growing Indian economy. In addition to providing employment to the local people, SourcePilani is also providing the rural youth an exposure to the paths of progress being witnessed in the bigger Indian cities.

The basic model followed by SourcePilani includes identifying youth from various schools/colleges who are interested in taking up a BPO career. Since most applicants are from Hindi medium of instruction, they are put through an English training course for a period of 3 months. Post this, the recruits are put on the job under the supervision of team leaders who groom the new comers and make them able to handle the tough requirements of a BPO career. As an outcome of all of this, the youth of Pilani have been able to increase their income levels and over a period of time the economic spectrum of the town will also be enhanced. This is a wonderful way of executing inclusive growth and progress. Here is a sample of a couple of recruits who have joined SourcePilani and how their lives has been transformed:

Rajendar Singh (Raju). Qualification: 10+2 (Hindi Medium) Raju like many of the youth in this part of the country was aspiring to get into the Indian army, unfortunately after several trials he couldn’t get through. His father is a Technician in the workshop in BITS Pilani and he was the only source of Income for a family of 4. Before joining SourcePilani, Raju lived the life of an unemployed for more than 3 years and SourcePilani gave him a chance to build his career in the BPO space. One year back he used to struggle to talk in English and his keyboard skills and computer skills were minimal. After undergoing a 3 month training Raju was put into on-the-job training where he honed his skills and improved upon his language capability. He started off with a petty salary which was <100 rupees a day a year ago and today with his hard work and sincerity he has been promoted to the level of Team Leader, for SourcePilani’s Internet Marketing Team. He manages complex jobs like Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing and he heads a team of 5 members. Currently he draws a Salary of 5000 rupees which is a significant financial support for his family.

Pooja. Qualification: BSc. (Hindi Medium)
Pooja has been working with SourcePilani for over a year now. There are very few girls in the organization today and this is mostly because of the cultural aspects in Rajasthan. Pooja and her parents made the right decision to send her to work, by neglecting all the peer pressure from the society. Like Raju, even Pooja started off with a petty salary and today she earns a salary of over 5000 and she is able to fund the education of her two younger sisters.

Check out the following table to get an idea of the impact that SourcePilani is having on the economic progress of the town’s inhabitants:

To get a visual idea of what SourcePilani is doing and their impact on the society, please check out the video embed below:

If you are unable to see the embed above, please click here to view the video.

You can know more about SourcePilani and contact them at their website: www.sourcepilani.com

A lot has been said of BPOs. They have changed people’s lives and brought a modicum of hope to the lesser privileged sections of society that was denied for so long. However, till now the story was mostly restricted to urban India. Thanks to the efforts of a few like an enterprising District Collector in Tamil Nadu, Santhosh Babu and an economics graduate straight out of a US college, Kartik Raman, rural India now has an opportunity to be included in the BPO boom, and avail of alternative and better sources of income than what they could eke out from their meagre resources.

Kartik, along with 2 others, started a rural BPO in Bagad village in Jhunjhunu district if Rajasthan with 10 women, many out of class X and some graduates. A year later, the BPO called Source of Change boasts of 30 more employees earning between Rs.3500 and Rs.7000. Kartik plans to expand to more towns, recruiting about 1000 employees by 2012.

When Santhosh Babu decided to open a BPO for his collectorate, he recruited and trained villagers who had failed class X. The first BPO was of 100 seats capacity and was started with a loan of Rs.20 lakhs from the District Rural Development Agency. Its biggest client today is the US All State Insurance. Sreelatha Menon reports in Business Standard:

The most important gain of the BPO experiment in Tamil Nadu is that it recruits mostly people in villages who have failed Class X as well as graduates and pays both equal salaries of up to Rs 5,000.

After the tremendous success of the BPO experiment, Babu has been made the Managing Director of Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (Elcot) to expand his operations to all 30 districts. Elcot has started a rural finishing scool where 7000 dropouts have already been trained, and plans to tender applications for franchises in every village. Every franchisee has to profitable and uncompromising on quality. The model is already serving as an inspiration for other states to embark on a similar development path.

We wish these dedicated few all the success in their endeavours and hope many more will join their ranks in improving the lot of all the far flung villages in India.

Read the rest of the story here.
Image Courtesy: Wikipedia

Scavenger women from Rajasthan participating in fashion show in New York

A group of scavenger women from a town in Rajasthan called Alwar sashaying down the ramp with leading supermodels in New York? Thirty seven women who, a few years ago earned their living by cleaning dry latrines and carrying night soil in containers on their head, now attending events and speaking at the United Nations headquarters? Unbelievable??

This has been made possible by Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak and his organization Sulabh International Social Service Organization. He decided to liberate these women of their stigma and train them in vocations like food processing, tailoring, embroidery and beauty treatments. Thus was born the programme called Nai Dishayein (New Directions) in 2003. Now these women can walk with their head held high and hold conversations with heads of state without feeling any inferiority due to birth and circumstances. Read more about the remarkable story of Dr. Pathak and the success of his initiative in the Women’s Feature Service article available in an interesting Nepal publication called Gorkhapatra here.

Also, you can find more about Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak and the work his NGO Sulabh International has done to deal with issues like hygiene and sanitation, among others by visiting their website: http://www.sulabhinternational.org/