As the trend of KPO catches on the world, India is turning out to be the most preferred destination of foreign countries to outsource their business services. The reason being primarily, the vast pool of knowledge and a significant cost arbitrage. India is welcoming the influx of foreign workload and is emerging as a promising solution to all the outsourcing needs of the world. After the BPO buzz that took over the country few years ago, KPO is the new buzzword.

Some reasons for this increased preference towards India in comparison to other nations like Philippines, Russia, China, Canada, Ireland and Mexico are illustrated below:

Labor Pool
India abounds with many technical universities and colleges that produce over 75,000 IT graduates and 20 lakh English-speaking graduates annually. This number far exceeds the produce of any other nation, thus making India the largest supplier of manpower that is needed for KPO.
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Labor Costs
The labor costs in India ranks as low as the manpower strength ranks high. Typical salaries range from $5,000 to $12,000 for technical staff, while back-office salaries range from $3,500 to $7,500. this makes India all the more attractive to companies who aim at cost cutting. Foreign companies usually end up saving more than 50% by outsourcing services here.

Government Policies
The Indian government has a national minister specifically for IT. Unlike other countries, the Indian government is in favor of IT foreign ownership and imposes no export taxes on the same. This makes it all the more easier for foreign companies to carry out their business processes here.

Infrastructure
The infrastructure in India is very reliable. With redundant telecom and utility infrastructure, there is very good reliability factor within India's special IT parks. Reliability can be spotty outside the parks or in more remote areas.

Expertise
India has expertise in application development, maintenance, financial processing per se. Experts predict that India will become a hotbed for more critical analytical jobs.

Customers
For India Citigroup, GE Capital and American Express have a very large presence and have set up their own centers here.



All these above mentioned factors add up to proclaim that in the coming years, India will be the most sought after destination of the outsourcing countries. The ever increasing population has in it a vast pool of educated professionals who are able to handle high-end knowledge-based work and research. With all the technical expertise in place, both in terms of quality and quantity, India is slate to become the global KPO hub in the coming decades.

The cost advantage
While outsourcing companies find a cheaper bet in outsourcing work to India, India also stands to gain from the set up because of the numerous foreign players investing here. Investors get a cost advantage because quality work gets done at cheaper rates. For example, drafting and filing of patent applications in the US comes very expensive, with a typical application costing about $10,000 to $15,000 to draft and file with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Companies save up to 50 per cent of the cost when they offshore this work to India.

Foreign firms
In recent times many offshore firms Patent Metrix, Cantor-Colburn and Schwegman, Astra Zeneca, Motorola, Intel and IBM have set up centers in India. This testifies the fact that India is moving forward to become the largest KPO service provider in the world.



Michael Henderson is reputed KPO professional in India. He has many international KPO projects to his credit that has gained him expertise in KPO processes like data maintenance, e-mail list building and data research. His experience can be traced to his associations with many outsourcing firms.