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Of these, simple bulk transactions is the easiest to master and is likely to be, along with the broad shared services, the area into which developing countries such as India would enter.

Even India's current presence in global outsourcing reflects its domination of the market, at 80 per cent of the total according to an estimate by newspaper Le Monde quoted by ECD 2003. If that market is unlikely to grow rapidly, then the space available for new players is indeed limited, unless the market is redistributed. That would mean, as we argue below, that BPO is no great opportunity even for a country like India. It would also mean that, as in the case of primary products, competition between developing country providers of lower end services would drive prices down and transfer the benefits of low wages to international corporations leaving little behind in the developing world.

The rapid increase in revenues from this form of delivery is what gives rise to optimism about the role that IT services can play in growth. The strategy driven by that optimism implicitly sees growth in services as more likely to deliver employment, income and export revenue increases than that in the commodity producing sectors.

10. CONCLUSION

Segments like market research, engineering services, animation and biotech are bound to gain increasing prominence. Attrition might be controlled to some extent. However one thing is constant-the indispensability of BPO firms to companies across the globe.

Moreover, outsourcing dreams as well as the nightmares indicate how much the international marketplace rather than the growth of the domestic market has come to be accepted as the principal source of new employment.

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* Contributed by: -
Priyanka Ghosh & Alvika Derhgawen,
PGDIM, IM-11,
NITIE, Mumbai.