Our Bureau

Mumbai , Jan. 7

THE automotive and pharmaceutical industries will be taken as representatives to identify emerging outsourcing segments by the CII Western Region Task Force on Outsourcing.

A CII-AT Kearney white paper on outsourcing, released on Thursday, has identified these two to demonstrate that it is imperative for the industry to develop strong domain expertise and consulting skills, said Mr Ganesh Natarajan, Chairman of the Task Force, at a news conference here on Thursday.

The Indian BPO industry has witnessed a compound aggregate growth rate of more than 50 per cent, year-on-year, over the last few years. It has attained a size of about $3.5 billion and is well-poised to grow to between $18 billion and $24 billion by the end of the decade, noted the task force in its paper.

The Action Plan for the task force is to facilitate the development of the "next wave growth vision in the BPO industry." This would require collaboration among the industry, Central and state governments and educational institutions, said Mr Natarajan.

One of the objectives of the task force is to encourage the geographical spread of the BPO industry. "We find the BPO sector concentrated in 12 or 13 cities of the country; but we need to develop 70 to 80 cities with uniform infrastructure to be able to really grow the industry," said Mr Natarajan.

Despite the visible success of India in this area, the country has only 2 per cent to 3 per cent of the global outsourcing market, the biggest chunk of outsourcing done in the US itself. However, India has around 35 per cent of the offshoring market, he said.

High fragmentation and lack of sufficient scale of operations, except for the larger five players, is also in the way of India being able to address the needs of global customers.

The agenda for the task force consists of identifying and prioritising the interventions required from government, both state and Central, as well as industry.

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