Centre eases norms for BPOs

New Delhi: To cement India's position as a preferred global outsourcing destination, the government on Wednesday liberalised guidelines for voice-based BPOs removing the distinction between domestic and international units as well as permitting interconnectivity between all types of other service providers (OSPs) centres.

Broadly, the rules would allow global companies, says an airline, with a voice-based centre in India to now serve global and domestic customers with common telecom resources, something that required dedicated, separate infrastructure previously.

Moreover, the restrictions on data interconnectivity between any BPO (business process outsourcing) centre of the same company, a group company or any unrelated company has been done away with, allowing for massive flexibility in resource management for BPO operations.

The connectivity norms have also been eased for remote call centre agents, in any location, to link with customers. All in all, the measures would lead to major cost savings and significantly improve utilisation for BPOs, positioning India as a favourable hub for IT-enabled service operations.

"In order to encourage our BPO industry, OSP guidelines that were liberalised in November 2020 have been simplified even further, offering greater ease of business and regulatory clarity. This will further reduce compliance burden and help our tech industry," Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted.

While OSPs will have to self-regulate their operations and there is no requirement to submit reports to the telecom department on a routine basis, players will have to maintain call data record, usage data record and system log for all customer calls for a stipulated period, and abide by data security norms.

These liberalised guidelines for OSPs would benefit BPO organisations giving voice-based services, in India and abroad. Simply put, OSPs are entities providing application services, IT-enabled services, call centre services or any kind of outsourcing services using telecom resources. The distinction between domestic and international OSPs has been removed.

A BPO centre with common telecom resources will now be able to serve customers located worldwide, including in India. With the removal of the distinction between domestic and international OSP centres, the interconnectivity between all types of such centres is now permitted, according to the new guidelines.