NEW DELHI :The Centre on Wednesday removed distinctions between local and foreign business process outsourcing (BPO) units providing voice-related services and relaxed norms on storing and sharing data, aiming to attract more BPOs to India.
The new norms allow a BPO centre with common telecom resources to serve customers located worldwide, including India. This allows interconnectivity between all kinds of other service providers (OSPs), which allows firms more flexibility in terms of resource management. A small operator situated in rural areas will be able to work with larger operations.
The government also allowed BPOs to use EPABX exchanges located anywhere in the world to route their calls. OSPs that aren’t using EPABX services from telecom service providers will also be able to locate EPABXs at third-party data centres in India. Remote agents of OSPs can connect directly to the centralized EPABX using wireless, wireline or broadband technologies.
Interconnectivity restrictions that existed so far required companies to have different workforces for domestic and international businesses. They also needed to invest in two different EPBAX systems, raising capital expenditures.
Union IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad termed the changes “revolutionary". “We’ve issued a guideline today that’s very extensively liberalizing guideline other service providers’ guidelines. The is revolutionary in nature that’ll make India a very favourable destination for expansion of voice-related BPO centres," Prasad said.
Further, allowing remote workers to connect directly with centralized EPABX will allow rural BPOs to generate more jobs and revenues, he said.
These changes follow a slew of decisions in November 2020 to reduce compliance burden and facilitate work from home models, and removal of mandatory bank guarantees. An April 2021 survey by industry body Nasscom found that 72% respondents were “highly satisfied" with the November reforms.
“The new guidelines will enable industry to fully leverage technology to implement work from anywhere in a seamless manner and provide greater flexibility to utilize their infrastructure and design their service delivery model to better serve the global market," Nasscom said in a statement. “The reforms will add to India’s attractiveness in terms of ease of doing business," it added.
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