Setting up a BPO in Rural Areas

I had a long time back heard of some BPO operations in Rural areas of Kerala. Today I came across this news item of Tata Chemicals Society for Rural Development (TCSRD) inaugrating it's BPO operations called Uday at it's Mithapur plant in Gujarat. This is one good means of generating employment in the rural areas and bridging the Digital Divide. This is a Win-Win situation for the Owners of the operations and the Rural Society. The advantages of the operations are obvious:-

• Labour at low cost
• Low attrition rate
• Low operating costs

But the key is the availability of infrastructure. If the Govt. or some other private organizations take up the task of setting up infrastructure many such business can flourish.

Online Railway Reservation Service

The last time I went home, I felt the need for this. I had to accompany my uncle to the Satellite Railway Reservation Office in Aamadaalavalasa, to book the tickets for my uncle and his family. The place is around 30 km from my village, so we had to travel all the way and end up standing in a queue. After 1 hr of waiting the guy closed the counter for lunch. We came back after lunch only to find the "Link Failed" board at the counter. Luckily after waiting for some time the link was restored and we finally got our work done.

If we had some internet-cafe in the nearby town with a good/reliable internet connection, we could have used the IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Cororation Ltd.) website to reserve the tickets online. This could have saved us time and money. Isn't this a good business idea? Perhaps somebody can provide this Service through his internet-cafe at a premium. The precursor is a good and reliable internet connectivity. I see that there are a handful of internet cafe's in the nearby town, but the connection is quite slow and also unreliable. But there was a significant improvement from the time when I had used it a year ago. Hopefully within the next year things improve in this direction either because of state-owned ISPs (Internet Service Providers) like BSNL or other private ISPs. One thing that comes to the mind is that if there was tremendous improvement in the Cellular connectivity over there (Consider the fact that it has been more than a year since Cellular Service Providers like BSNL, Reliance, Airtel and Hutch have started their operations there) , why is that the Internet Connectivity not improving? It's simple : No big Demand for it. The other thing to note is that even Satellite-based TV like Tata-Sky is also becoming popular over there within very short time of it's introduction.