In Nashik city nearly 20 IT companies, including BPO companies like WNS Global Services, Tricom India, and Datamatics have found a new home in Nashik. According to a recent report on top alternative destination for BPOs in India by US-based consultancy firm Alsbridge, for smaller cities, Nashik tops the list.
“Nashik is just witnessing the shift that is happening globally with other tier III cities,” says Sabyasachi Satyaprasad, head of advisory services at research firm NeoIT.
“There is increasing intent by both third-party service providers and captive BPOs to shift to tier III cities like Nashik to optimise the cost of operations resulting due to high attrition rates and increasing real estate costs in top IT cities,” he adds.
Nashik officials are touting huge manpower resources as one of the selling point for the city to the talent-starved ITeS industry. According to a government source, the current strength of BPO workforce in Nashik is believed to be around 2,000, but the number is expected to swell up to 10,000 by 2009.
“Talent base is getting saturated in metros and top IT cities, hence we had to look for the newer resources of talent in other areas like Nashik,” says Chetan Kothari, managing director, Tricom India. Tricom has nearly 400 employees in its Nashik facility and plans to scale this number to 700-800 by the end of the next quarter.
Shifting to Nashik has resulted in 10-15% savings in manpower costs for Tricom, said Mr Kothari. It is interesting to note that along with the BPO ready workforce in the region, companies opening centres in Nashik are also banking on the undergraduate college population to join the companies as they adopt the earn-and-learn model, say recruiters in the city.
