THE BIGGEST JOB-GENERATING SECTORS IN 2004
INDUSTRY	NUMBERS
IT services	1 lakh
BPO	2 lakh
Telecom & value-added (Direct & Indirect)	2 lakh
Retail (Direct & Indirect)	5.5 lakh
Financial services	50,000
Pharma research	10,000
Hotels	10,000
Healthcare	10,000

Sn a few months, Reliance Infocomm will roll out its enterprise broadband service which, by the year-end, will have made its way into hundreds of Indian cities. To lay the network, operate and maintain it, Reliance will need to hire some 5,000 people. Simultaneously, the Ambanis will open 2,000 Reliance WebWorld Express shops across the country. Each shop will be manned by at least five people. Including part-timers, the company estimates these shops will create employment for 25,000.

If the Reliance group is known for its penchant for size and scale, amply manifested in its world-class petrochemical plants and refinery-as well as Reliance Infocomm's 6.3 million customer base (at last count)-the Ambanis are now on the verge of setting a benchmark for the sheer number of jobs they will create. Try this for size: Over the next two-three years, Reliance Infocomm will hire some 42,000 people, and will provide indirect employment to another 4-5 lakh. Other than recruitments on the network and the WebWorld Express fronts, the Infocomm project will hire thousands for their Netway services (multimedia broadband), soon-to-be-launched PCO booths and call centres; besides the existing 5,000-seater, Reliance is now planning a voice and data centre that will deploy 10,000 executives.

Lest you think it's only the Ambanis (who for good measure are also on a hiring spree in their oil and gas and power businesses) who are recruiting big-time, take a walk across India's domestic corporate landscape-and you might just get poached! The hiring may not be across industry, but rather in select sunrise sectors-largely services, like retail, financial services, it and IT-enabled services, and heathcare. Whilst the sheer volume of jobs will be generated, directly and indirectly, in such sectors, niche spaces like pharma and auto research, high-end BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) or knowledge management, and even oil & gas exploration, will call for qualitative, specialised hiring, of PhDs, scientists, geo-physicists, and economists. According to BT estimates-arrived at after talking to scores of headhunters and industry executives-at least 2.2 million jobs will be created in India's private sector over the next two years. "There's real job creation taking place in the private sector," avers Arun Tadanki, President & Managing Director (Asia), Monster.com, a global jobs portal.

"Whilst the big volumes are coming in from new sectors like retail. There is also quite a lot of organic growth taking place in job-creation" Sonal Agrawal, Director, Accord Group (India)

It's Open Season

Here's a quick run through who needs how many: Tata Teleservices, which currently has an employee base of 5,500 across six states, will create 20,000 jobs for its 11 new telecom circles by March 2005. Enough of telecom, let's move on to IT services: Headhunters reveal in 2004 Infosys, Wipro and TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) will rope in between 6,000 and 8,000 people each, Satyam another 4,000-5,000 and Accenture another 3,000-5,000 (most of these companies were unwilling to comment on future recruitments). In IT-enabled services, Convergys India will soon hit the 10,000-mark, up from the current 7,200, and by end-2005 it would have touched 20,000. Another BPO, Daksh, will move from 6,000 to 10,000 by end-2004, with the Manila centre getting ramped up to 1,000 soon. Unsurprisingly, then, headhunters like E. Balaji, General Manager (Staffing Solutions) at the Chennai-based Ma Foi Management Consultants, expect up to 1.6 lakh ITEs jobs to be generated in 2004 (others say it could go up to 2 lakh), and another 1 lakh recruitments to take place in the IT services area.

It gets even better when you step into the retail space. According to a study by Images Retail, a Delhi-based retail and fashion consultancy, by 2005 the retail business will have recruited 5 lakh trained hands directly, and another 8-10 times that number indirectly in the related supply chains. That's why companies like Pantaloon are talking about adding 7,000 personnel in two years. Shoppers' Stop plans to hire 3,000 till 2007. Don't also forget petroleum marketing where Reliance and the Essar group will between them put up roughly 10,000 diesel and petrol vending pumps across the length and breath of the company in the next two years. Each pump will roughly employ 10 people-indirectly, as many of these pumps will be franchisees-thereby creating all of 1 lakh jobs. Perhaps that's why a rejuvenated Essar group is talking of hiring some 1,500 people in 2004-05, 850 from Indian and MNC core sector companies, and some 625-650 at the entry-level (basically technical and management trainees).

Then there's the red-hot banking and finance sector, where the insurance sector itself should create 20,000 more jobs this year. And as banks get more aggressive on the retail front, they will have to hire at least 30,000-40,000 executives. Meantime, healthcare professionals like doctors, nurses and radiologists will continue to be absorbed overseas, largely by the US. According to a study by Monster.com, the shortfall of healthcare professionals in the US by 2005 will be even larger than the deficit of 4 lakh IT professionals that country experienced in 2000. Other than the US, demand for healthcare professionals will also come from the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Meantime, a host of India companies setting up overseas bases, in sectors ranging from IT services to BPO to automobiles to pharmaceuticals, are hiring abroad in sizeable numbers (See Hunting Global Heads).

Have Degree, Will Get Job

Phew. It's boom time all right-for industry, for headhunters and, of course, for the employable masses out there. Record growth rates being posted by companies coupled with burgeoning consumer demand are making companies more eager to hire. At the same time, newer sectors like retail, BPO (both the plain vanilla type and the high-end stuff) and even fledglings like event management will call for the largest numbers. ''Whilst the big volumes will come from the new sector, the good news is also that there's some organic growth in job creation taking place,'' points out Sonal Agrawal, Director, Accord Group (India).

HUNTING GLOBAL HEADS As Indian industry expands globally, it's hiring locals from those regions as well as people of Indian origin.

Amit Kalyani, VP (CTO), Bharat Forge: Hiring for overseas ops It all began in the closing years of the last millennium. As Indian IT companies expanded their global presence, they started recruiting foreign nationals and placing people of Indian origin in their operations overseas. Infosys, Wipro, Satyam Computers were among the forerunners in the race. Of course, TCS, thanks to its global delivery centres established over decades, was a pioneer in the field. Today, even a mid-sized IT company like the Rs 89-crore Nucleus Software, which focusses on the banking and financial sector, has a presence in Singapore, Japan, US, UK, and Australia. Says Mita Brahma, Head (Corporate hr), Nucleus Software: "Currently, we have about 200 people overseas and it is expected to grow to 300 by 2004-05." The second wave belongs to the pharma majors like Dr. Reddy's and Ranbaxy who are going global to attack the generics market and put added thrust on research to bring out their own molecules. Today, Ranbaxy's manpower is nearly 8,700. And around 1,800 are placed overseas. The offshore Ranbaxians have grown by 40 per cent in the last three years. Dr Reddy's too has been hiring aggressively in North America, China, and Russia. The manufacturing sector too is not far behind. Asian Paints, for instance, has 1,350 employees overseas spread over 23 countries out of which 1,300 are locals and 50 Indians. "In auto components," says A.K. Taneja, Senior Executive Director, Shriram Pistons and Rings, "there are several technologies that are coming to the country for the first time such as engine management systems and components with embedded software, and at the moment, there is a scarcity of expertise available for these technologies within the country....so Indian firms are scouting overseas for people with such knowledge domains along with expanding their operations abroad." In November last, Bharat Forge acquired CDP, Germany's second-largest forging company. From zilch, the company has today an overseas workforce (largely Germans), of around 800. Expands Amit Kalyani, VP-CTO, Bharat Forge: "It's part of a long-term strategy to be present physically in Europe, North America, and China and the recruitment will definitely go up." -Moinak Mitra

A word of caution, though: The private sector may be hiring, but as Tadanki of Monster.com explains, these companies constitute just 2 per cent of India's total workforce, estimated at around 400 million. Some 6 per cent of these jobs are in the government sector, another 60 per cent are self-employed people, and the rest are employed in the agricultural sector. The message here is clear: Have degree, will get job in sunrise sector.

The best part about the current boom is that it will provide jobs for both the masses as well as those with specialised degrees. For the 2.1 million graduates who pass out of India's non-engineering colleges, as well as the three lakh post-graduates and three lakh engineering degree and diploma holders, there's plenty of light at the end of the tunnel. For the graduates, the call centre and organised retail sectors will provide thousands of opportunities. ''Organised retail is a highly manpower-intensive industry, and it will generate plenty of employment, including across various functions of the supply chain,'' says Harminder P. Sahni, Principal & Associate Director, KSA Technopak, a retail consultant. So if organised retail in India will be employing 50,000 people a year for the next five years, it's just following the global trend: In the US for instance, a whopping 10 million are employed in retail, and even in markets like Malaysia and Thailand, where the share of organised retail is 40-50 per cent, one million and 1.6 million, respectively, are employed in this sector.

It won't take India too long to reach those levels, what with some 250 malls expected to be set up all over the country. "This industry will over time become one of the largest employers in the economy," says Vijay Kashyap, Vice President (Human Resources), Shoppers' Stop. Experts say 5,000 people to man a single mall is a reasonable thumb rule, with one person per 100 feet. Of course, if you also consider the unorganised retail sector-which also needs to employ people, right?-the job-generating potential is tremendous. Already, according to KSA Technopak, Indian organised and unorganised retail employs a mind-boggling 38 million.

"Organised retail is a highly manpower-intensive industry and it will generate plenty of employment, including a across various functions of the supply chain" Harminder P. Sahni, Principal & Associate Director, KSA Technopak

So whilst the quantitative plain vanilla jobs will be generated by sectors like call centres and retail, there's a simultaneous demand-though not in millions-for highly qualified specialists in areas like knowledge management, IT consulting, IT product development, auto and pharma research, and oil and gas exploration. "For people with qualitative skills, the salary differential at the entry level is huge-up to Rs 3.5 lakh as against Rs 1.5 lakh for plain vanilla jobs," points out Sridhar Ganesan, consultant at hr firm Watson Wyatt. Headhunters point out that IT is MNC offshoring development centres of firms like Goldman Sachs, Accenture, Macromedia, and Adobe that are looking to hire such highly-skilled personnel. What is in their favour is that since they're cost centres, their salaries are typically 30-35 per cent higher than their local counterparts. High-end BPO firms like OfficeTiger, for instance, which offers backend research for the top seven global investment banks, are also hiring in droves. Currently employing 1,500 people, Joseph Sigelman, Co Founder, OfficeTiger, plans to hire another 1,500 in the course of the year. "We expect the business momentum to continue."

''The ITEs sector will generate up to 1.6 lakh jobs this year, and IT another 1 lakh. Organised retail, telecom, and insurance are the other sectors where jobs will be generated on a large scale'' E. Balaji, GM (Staffing Solutions)/Ma Foi Management Consultants

The research-driven pharma sector too is witnessing plenty of job-creation of the top-notch variety-of not just scientists, and PhDs in medicinal chemistry, but also of quality legal professionals and those with dual degrees in patent law and chemistry to tackle the nuances of litigation in the highly-competitive generics markets of the US. Dr Swati Piramal, Head of Strategic Alliances, Nicholas Piramal, which is setting up a 2.5 lakh sq. feet research centre in suburban Mumbai, plans to double the number of scientists to 400 in two years. For good measure, she's also hiring personnel (many from abroad) for legal, quality assurance, and doctors with MBAs, and will also take the company's fieldforce-which is the largest in India today-to 3,500 from 2,900 in two years. Glenn Saldanha, Managing Director, Glenmark Pharma, another research-driven firm, is also building a scientific pool with expertise in chemistry, biology, analytics, and formulation development. "We will hire at least 100 a year for the next couple of years, and this pool will be a mix of masters, PhDs, post-doctorates and guys who've studied abroad." The pioneer of them all, Dr Reddy's, which has pool of 1,050 scientists, added all of 389 in the scientific stream last year.

''There aren't enough medicinal chemists in India, so we're hiring them from abroad. So there's actually a reverse brain drain happening'' Swati Piramal, Head of Strategic Alliances/Nicolas Piramal

Of course, such no-holds-barred demand for such quality personnel isn't easy to meet. Dr Piramal doesn't mince her words when she says there's a "war on for talent. There is a great shortage of scientists. India produces many, but few are specialised. For instance, there aren't enough medicinal chemists, so we're hiring them from abroad, along with patent attorneys, and people with expertise in toxicology, where India is weak. So there's actually a reverse brain drain happening," she adds. Money for scientists isn't the prime motivator, and what matters more is the quality of infrastructure and resources, as well as the creative freedom promoters are willing to provide them. How important they're in an organisation is evident from the Chief Scientific Officer's position at Nicholas-he's on a par with the company's Chief Operating Officer.

It Isn't Just The Metros

In the meanwhile, the mass employers have to deal with a slightly different problem-that of attrition. With so many call centres and so many malls, marts, and hypermarkets mushrooming, call centre and mall jocks are only too willing to jump jobs for better prospects. Sahni of KSA Technopak points out that the high employee turnover rate in the retail industry is an area of concern. Surprise, surprise, many of them are headed for the call centre industry. The solution according to Sahni: ''Salaries need to come up at par with other sectors (read: BPO).'' The hotel industry too is facing its own share of retention problems. "We are being heavily poached by international chains," says Bernard Martyris, Senior Vice President (Human Resources), the Taj group of hotels. That's one reason he needs to hire 100 management trainees a year, in addition to the 100-120 recruited every time a new property is set up.

''There will be big action in banking and finance, with the insurance sector generating some 20,000 jobs and the retail space another 30,000-40,000'' Arun Tadanki, President & Managing Director/Asia, Monster.com

That's like music to the ears of the sea of youth that's being employed in these industries. After all, there's scarcely a better retention strategy than higher pay-packets. What's more, the hiring isn't happening any more just in the main metros, but as call centres and malls move deeper into Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad, and Kolkata, and even tier-II cities like Trivandrum, Coimbatore, Guwahati, and Jamshedpur, employment will begin to be created in these regions too. "For the last two years, most of the recruitment happened in the big cities. Now, thanks to organised retail moving into lesser urban market, job-creation in tier-II cities will grow this year," says Balaji of Ma Foi Management Consultants. And as the likes of Reliance Infocomm and Tata Teleservices take their network deeper into the Indian hinterlands the recruitment spree can only get broader based.

To conclude, an interesting nugget and a note of caution. First the nugget: The North East Tourism Department has apparently created a pool of 300 bright youngsters, and presented this database to retailers planning to expand in that region.

Now for the caveat: unemployment continues to be one of India's biggest problems. The creation of a mere 2.2 million jobs over the next two years in a country of a billion-plus is, whichever way you look at IT, inadequate. Macro-economists fear that India is at the threshold of a period of jobless growth. Does this magazine concur? Not quite. If the economy continues to grow at the rate at which it did in the October-December quarter (8.9 per cent) over the next two to three years, things could change. And the creation of new jobs won't happen at an incremental rate, but at an exponential one. That's a big if.

-additional reporting by Venkatesha Babu, Nitya Varadarajan, Priya Srinivasan, Ashish Gupta, Dipayan Baishya, E. Kumar Sharma, and Amanpreet Singh