Re: so what else can we outsource?
Even the Indian Gov't is jumping on this Outsourcing bandwagon!
India outsources government work - The Financial Times
By Edward Luce in New Delhi (11th Feb 2005)
The Indian government on Wednesday announced its largest outsourcing deal, to digitise hundreds of thousands of paper-based corporate filings, in New Delhi's most visible step so far to reform its slow-moving bureaucracy.
The $78m contract went to Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest software company. Reformers say outsourcing government work to the private sector is politically the least costly way of improving public sector efficiency. India's 23m government employees are in effect unsackable. Many Indians complain of continuing inertia in government offices.
“Outsourcing is the way forward it introduces accountability and it saves taxpayers' money,” said Vijay Kelkar, a former finance ministry official, who last year launched India's first online tax payment system also contracted out to a private company.
“It doesn't result in any public sector job losses so it is relatively easy to push through.”
One senior official said: “This is the Indian way of reform. You go from A to B via F.”
Under yesterday's award, TCS will digitise the corporate filings of 650,000 Indian companies across 22 national offices. Many of India's company registrar centres are large warehouses containing paper mountains from which information is rarely if ever retrieved.
TCS, listed on the equity markets last year in India's largest initial public offering, is to convert the paper records within six years. The project is intended to make a potential goldmine of corporate information instantly available online.
The number of companies in India has more than tripled from 205,000 in 1991 when New Delhi embarked on economic liberalisation to 650,000 today. But gathering information about all but the best known of India's listed companies is difficult.