The top two BPO companies in India, Infosys BPO and Mphasis have rubbished the recent report of Indian BPO industry chopping 2.5 lakh jobs by the first quarter of 2009 which has been creating doubt and uncertainty in the minds of many BPO employees in India.

Speaking to IT Examiner, The Infosys BPO vice-president and HR head, K Raghavendra rubbishing what he called a mere speculation said BPO sector will lose 2.5 lakhs jobs. Commenting on the report, Raghavendra said, “the reports was completely bull and speculative”.

He further added saying that the report was completely baseless as 250,000 is a huge number which is definitely not happening but some impact may be there in the present crisis.

When asked about the present job scenario in BPO sector and its probable impact on job cuts in Infosys BPO, he said there are no plans as yet.

The Infy BPO HR further added light saying, “Today, we are re-deploying people across in various functions. We have a pool close to about 800-1,000 people. We are calling every one of them by April only. They have been given offers in last six-eight months and we are calling people to come and join us because we have given them offers”.

Wipro’s recent recruitment episode has raised a question on the companies keeping their words while recruiting as the engineers from Kolkata were asked to join BPO after getting selected for engineering and IT positions.

On that angle, Raghavendra maintained, “We don’t target engineering graduates, may be, there could be five per cent of the people who are engineers, the rest is all plain vanilla graduates. We make them undergo training. We don’t take freshers for technical processes unless they have applied saying that they want vanilla job. MBAs from low-end colleges, graduates and engineers who are not from the premier institutes apply for jobs with us and if they meet the selection criteria, we appoint”.

Mphasis rubbishes too
The Mphasis chief human resources officer, Elango R also rubbished the report. On lay-offs in Mphasis, Elango firmly said, “We are not on lay-offs and we are 100 per cent”.

The recent takeover of EDS (Mphasis’s parent company) by HP has raised few management transitional questions in the market. Elango declined to comment on anything which is not directly linked with Mphasis. He maintained, “We don’t comment on anything that has HP angle. Don’t ask me about HP, don’t ask me EDS”.

On the overall industry perspective, Elango said “It is very difficult to say about Industry. I can only talk for our company. You can go and check, our attrition has actually dropped, we are actually hiring people”.

On the over-dependency on US clients, Elango added: “No, some of them are US clients. We have a large presence in UK and Europe, especially in BPO. Dependency is there but it depends on the kind of work we do”. X