The Sri Lankan government has invested nearly $100 million on e-governance projects in partnership with World Bank. The project is spread over a period of 5 years and covers six of the core areas, namely: ICT policy, leadership and institutional development, information infrastructure, Re-engineering Government, ICT HR capacity building, ICT investment and private sector development and e-Society.
“The government has been proactively pursuing to IT investments in the country and is offering several incentives like announcing three year tax holiday for the companies even with minimal investments. Infact ICTA, the nodal agency for ICT investments is in talks with builders in India like L&T to build IT parks in Sri Lanka similar to the ones in India and provide all the necessary world class infrastructure required by the global companies,” he said.
Although some of the top companies both Indian as well as global firms are already operating out of Sri Lanka, the figures are in no match compared to India. The nascent software and BPO industry employs about 10,000 people in the IT sector followed by 3,500 people in BPO sector, a miniscule compared to Indian count. However, the turnover of the software sector is about $100 million while that of BPO is $45 million, he revealed.
Speaking on their objective of visit, he said that ICTA is keen to tap the BPO market opportunities that India can provide and enable the companies to leverage on some of their inherent strengths. For one the attrition is very low compared to India ranging in the ration of 2-5 percent and labor costs being nearly 40-60 percent less than that of a basic call center operator in India.
“Though we cannot match the numbers churned out by Indian companies, we would like to leverage our strengths in certain niche segments like financial, legal, medical and clinical sectors. Since Sri Lanka has the maximum number of British certified accountants outside of UK, we can look at BPOs with financial and accounting research and analytics. So is the case in medical and clinical sectors, where we have people resources in terms of British certified doctors and researchers, ” he said.
However, training is a major concern of the industry where quality training is scarce and companies train most of employees in-house or need to be imported from India, which is infact a dampener to them, as it requires investment in terms of time, trained resources and capital, he said.
For the same reason, he said that the government is planning to invest six million dollar for training alone in ITES and BPO sector and plans to partner with institutes, which are accredited and recognized globally. The objective is to build capacity to rapidly scale to the needs of global firms in terms of skilled people resources, ITES-BPO skill sets, management ranging from basic operators to mid management to senior level executives like CIO, CEOs.
The delegation is infact in town to scout for companies in the business of ITES BPO training and expects to close few deals here. Currently some of the companies operating in Sri Lanka are WNS, HDPL (a HSBC captive center), Office Tiger, Virtuasa, Astron apart from other global companies.
Quelle/Source: CIOL, 08.06.2006
