Big IT sector reform! Permanent Work From Home will boost global competitiveness

What started out as a temporary solution for the Indian IT & ITES companies to facilitate work from home, has now become a structural change which could result in Indian BPM (Business Process Management) industry becoming further competitive in the global markets.

The latest guidelines issued by the Telecom Ministry have done away with several compliance and operational redundancies such as registration, bank guarantee, curb on interconnection between OSP centres, penalty and audit provisions alongside retaining security related obligations to protect against unlawful content, calls or messages carried on through the network.

Welcoming the move, IT industry body Nasscom in a statement said that it will result in tremendously reducing compliance burden of the BPM industry. The new framework now allows for infrastructure sharing between international and domestic OSPs over VPN along with interconnectivity of OSPs, facility to work from anywhere. Nikhil Narendra, Partner, TMT at Trilegal says, "The definition of the term OSP has been limited to voice-based BPO service providers removing the data-based services entirely from the ambit of the regulation."

The new framework primarily contains certain security obligations with additional high-level protections to prevent toll bypass, he added.

Keshav R. Murugesh, Group CEO, WNS and Immediate Past Chairman, NASSCOM is also of the view that this move will enable the Indian IT-BPM industry to progress to the next level of growth and drive global impact, job creation and development of Tier 3 and 4 cities allowing effective operations of hybrid model of work.

"The biggest advantage of this policy change is that it will open the doors for us to tap into new talent pool such as the young workforce and retired people with domain knowledge who want to work for few hours remotely. Also, the 110 million strong potential workforce of women with secondary degrees can find employment," he said.   

 "At WNS, we are working towards building this hybrid model and we are calling this the 'Hub, Edge and Spoke' model. In this model, we are looking at what has to be done from the office (HUB), what can be done from home (EDGE); and what can be done from smaller satellite offices (SPOKE)," added Keshav.

Also read: Permanent 'Work From Home' for IT employees now possible! Govt relaxes rules