Govt liberalises guidelines for voice BPO industry

Aimed at making India a leading global destination for voice BPOs, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology on Wednesday announced the liberalisation of guidelines for other service providers (OSPs).

"We have today extensively liberalised OSP guidelines. This revolutionary step will make India a global destination for BPOs," Communications Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters while announcing new guidelines.

According to the government, India’s IT-BPM industry stood at $37.6 billion (approx. Rs 2.8 lakh crores) in 2019-20. The industry can witness double-digit growth of up to $55.5 billion (approx. Rs 3.9 lakh crores) by 2025. The BPM industry’s revenues grew from $37.6 billion in 2019-20 to $38.5 billion in 2020-21.

He also said the distinction between domestic and international OSPs has been removed and relaxed norms for how they store and share data amongst their units.

A BPO centre with common telecom resources will now be able to serve customers located worldwide including in India. This allows interconnectivity between all kinds of OSPs, which means firms can offload traffic amongst different centres, or to each other. A small operator situated in rural areas will be able to work with larger operations, said a statement from the Ministry.

With the removal of the distinction between domestic and international OSP centres, the interconnectivity between all types of OSP centres, is now permitted.

EPABX (Electronic Private Automatic Branch Exchange) of the OSP can be located anywhere in the world. OSPs apart from utilising EPABX services of the Telecom Service Providers can also locate their EPABX at third Party Data Centres in India, said the statement.

Remote Agents of OSP can now connect directly with the Centralised EPABX/ EPABX of the OSP/ EPABX of the customer using any technology including Broadband over wireline/ wireless.No restriction for data interconnectivity between any OSP centres of the same company or group company or any unrelated company.

In addition, the regulations exempted OSPs from the requirement of any registration. Also, no Bank Guarantees were to be furnished. Work from Home and Work from Anywhere was also permitted. Penalties for violations were removed altogether, said the statement.