Help's here: Employees at a counselling session conducted by Intelenet in Mumbai to help them cope with pressures of work

A few months ago, a delegate from the UK, seated at a presentation by a call centre CEO in a swank Mumbai office posed a question that raised the hackles of the CEO as well as his Venture Capitalist. "What I really worry about is whether an exploitative sweat-shop type of allegation could be levelled against call centres in India, somewhat like the issue Nike faced with its units in Bangladesh."

The CEO wore a stunned expression. "Does this look like a sweat-shop to you?" he countered. The irony is that it looked like anything but. With its post-modern décor, innovative use of stone, glass and shopfloor machinery to reflect a mill (the office is situated in central Mumbai, where once a textile mill used to stand), the office had actually been a talking point for admiring delegates. The question sounded almost preposterous.

But the visiting delegate saw something that bothered him-the dark side of the call centre business in India. Where agents typically report to work a little before their bedtime, where their average age is about 23, where they work in "pressure-cooker" like stress situations, where their performance is measured through the duration of "talk time" and "wrap time", where they are isolated from family and society, and wear a false identity that needs to come off when they deal with the real world.

Expectedly, the sum of these factors has indeed thrown up a set of sociological and psychological challenges with which an entire generation of young call centre employees is grappling. What follows are the stories of Santosh Joseph, A. Senthil, Anurima Chowdhury and Chetan Kamat, all part of a population of about three to five lakh call centre agents across India's six largest cities, who are trying hard to resign themselves to the fact that their working life is nothing like they ever dreamed it would be. (All names have been changed on request).

The Human Toll of BPO

When college dropout Santosh "Santy" Joseph received a job offer for Rs 7,000 per month two years ago from a leading Bangalore-based call centre, he was over the moon. This was the chance the Pink Floyd devotee was waiting for to live out his American dream. "For the first time, I was made to feel that I was useful and that somebody appreciated my knowledge of English movies and my passion for Western music." A year down the line he switched jobs to another call centre which offered him Rs 16,000 a month and a training trip to the US. The latter was really the carrot for Santy who had by then begun to tire of the tedium of the job. The US trip was particularly significant since he could now finally prove to his conservative parents that he too was off to the US like his "cousins in software". But unlike his cousins in software, he was beginning to exhibit behavioural and physiological changes. He had lost 12 kgs in seven months, suffered severe hair loss, was smoking over 15 cigarettes a day and drank till he passed out every Friday. "I sometimes feel helpless," he laments. "I have lost touch with my relatives. I get home at four in the morning and when I wake up, my family is out at work and it's just TV or computer games for me. It's also the monotony of work and boredom that sometimes makes me feel suicidal."

Santosh is just articulating what thousands of call centre agents have started to recognise as the flip side of their jobs. "I have had more than a 100 cases of call centre employees turning up with a series of complaints," says Sanjay Chugh, a Delhi-based psychiatrist. "The typical problems tend to be depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse and relationship-related problems." Harish Shetty, a Mumbai-based psychiatrist, isn't surprised. "Because of night shifts, the agents gradually get detached from their families, married life suffers and their emotional hygiene is at stake given that altered sleep cycles play havoc with an area of the brain called the hypothalamus, which finally controls thyroid and adrenaline levels; in some cases there is also hearing loss due to constantly listening to a device; some even suffer an identity crisis given that they take on a foreign identity at the centre."

"I feel lonely during the day. The sense of isolation is growing. Going for continuous night work has made me lose weight. My eyes become red and swollen from time to time. Besides, a call centre job is not considered respectable. My neighbours think I am an idler and that makes me feel worse." That's a honest confession from Chennai-based call centre agent A. Senthil.

The Need For A Reality Check

While the money and the act of donning an accent through their working hours may be the initial draw for several youngsters in call centres, reality soon sets in. "The job is so false," gripes 23-year-old Vivek Nair who eventually quit his job in a Mumbai call centre to pursue an MBA degree. "You talk like an American, behave like one, but you are not one-it's almost like a trap."

The job is full of anomalies, according to Chetan Kamat, a call centre employee with a collections-BPO in Mumbai. "You may be talking to overseas customers but what you are doing is taking a lot of flak and getting yelled at every call you make; now we even get yelled at by people who accuse us of having snatched their jobs," he says, referring to customers who recognise that the call is coming from India and give vent their frustrations.

All of this is in addition to rigid monitoring on the floor where an agent is allowed a maximum of 45 minutes "wrap time" or time when he isn't talking to customers in an eight-hour shift. Snack breaks, cigarette breaks or even a break to attend the washroom is included in those 45 minutes. "Earlier, we were not allowed to use the washroom while attending calls; no matter how desperate the biological urge was, we had to wait for the break to leave the seat," discloses Anurima Chowdhury, a Delhi-based call centre agent. "In September 2002, we convinced the manager that this was inhuman and now we are allowed to use the washroom in between calls." The practice, however, continues in many call centres. Typically, an eight-hour shift is punctuated with one half-an-hour and two 15-minute breaks-referred to as 'coffee break' and 'sutta break' respectively in industry parlance. If the issues faced by call centre agents were to be listed in order of priority, our ranking would be: monotonous job, bizarre working hours (and the resultant isolation from society), imbalanced sleep cycles, physiological damage, and importantly, little or no growth potential.

The Way Out?

Unable to take the adverse employment conditions, call centre agents are beginning to take recourse to the law. "I know of 30 cases where nine girls and 21 guys filed cases separately against their employers on grounds of unfair employment conditions and unfair termination. In all the cases the issue was settled out of court," says Diljeet Titus of law firm Titus & Co.

The companies themselves are fast recognising the need to address the psychological and societal toll. Of particular concern is the high attrition rate of 25-40 per cent across the sector. Companies like Mumbai-based Intelenet have started to get counsellors to speak to the agents. "There are several issues, personal and professional, that the agents bring up and we felt it's best we have professional help at hand to guide us", says Manuel D'Souza, hr head, Intelenet. Still others have recognised the need to offer more to the employees. "Besides getting counsellors to come in and talk to the agents, we have additional initiatives like loans and grants for higher studies, and we try and fill senior positions as far as possible from within and try and move them around so they get as much exposure as possible within the various functions," says Ananda Mukerji, CEO, ICICI OneSource. Adds R. Elango, hr head at MsourcE, "Right from providing pottery classes to varying the light in the call centres, we undertake various measures to retain our talent." It's debatable whether these measures will actually address the issue on hand, which is really one of the human cost of BPO.

All things considered, the BPO agent's work is really not very different from the factory worker's given the regimen, routine processes and little scope for real growth. While factory workers have traditionally resorted to unionisation for better bargaining power, the proposition is a little far fetched for the call centre agent according to Titus. "There is no law to stop these employees from forming a trade union but there are a lot of indirect pressures and companies have mechanisms of conflict resolution within themselves (read counselling, fun at work, scholarships, etc.), so much so that an employee can be issued a show-cause notice for wanting to be part of a union. In fact, companies also keep the employees busy after work; you will find them at company parties or town hall meetings after work so they do not have the time to think about the ill effects of the job."

Watson Wyatt's BPO expert Sridhar Ganesan believes call centres need to move on from the entry strategy model of recruitment. Then, it was fine to tout the benefit of "making money while having fun"; as employees mature, he explains, they need much more of a value add which could come through innovation in the form of process improvements, development of a career path and "thinking roles".

Ideally, yes. But for an industry that's just finding its feet, it might be a while before this comes to be. For the moment, the BPO sector has spawned a generation whose problems are just about beginning to surface. Ironically, the gentleman from UK with whose question we began the story, unknowingly raised the thorny issue in the environs of one of the last bastions of the labour movement-the textile industry in Mumbai. The human toll of the collapse of that sector is now part of industrial folklore. While there may be no similarities between the two sectors on the face of it, two factors run as a common theme: the longevity of the sector (cheaper geographies and automation could ring the death knell of the Indian BPO story) and the future of its workers. Let's hope the BPO sector manages to steer the course in time to avert another story of colossal erosion of human capital.

-additional reporting by Venkatesha Babu and Nitya Varadarajan