Hamlet on the backroads engaged in BPO Work!

Tom Friedman wrote a book “The World is Flat”.. heck that was an understatement!

Here is an example of how this start-up – GramIt – has engaged youth in a hamlet where it takes over 10 hours by train and bus/car to reach! The guys there are doing – BPO work! Well .. not really for the high tech American or European but for the up and running folks in Hyderabad!

To get there, you take a 10-hour train ride from Hyderabad, the nearest big city, then drive an hour on narrow roads past rice paddies, coconut groves, and ponds teeming with prawns and crabs.

The village itself is a collection of simple brick houses and thatch-roof huts. Yet in a tidy office shaded by 30-foot-tall palms, 50 young people sit at PCs connected to the Internet via a long-distance radio link, doing business process outsourcing (BPO) tasks such as checking expense account receipts for Indian corporations and arranging job interviews for applicants in distant cities.

They’re working for GramIT, a 16-month-old nonprofit that’s seeking to transplant India’s tech services boom to some of the country’s 600,000 villages. Workers in Ethakota earn a fraction of what the outsourcing troops in Bangalore do, but they’re not complaining.

link