It’s good for the economy; it creates employment, lots of it, and working nights at India’s back offices is pleasing and financially rewarding for a huge number of young Indians.
However, while India’s money-spinning industry of taking service jobs from overseas is turning out to be a source of discomfort for U.S. and European politicians, the subcontinent is fast realizing that its now-famed success in so-called Business Process Outsourcing may have come at the cost of a generation’s mental well-being.
Owing to the 10 1/2 hour time difference between the Western Hemisphere, particularly the United States, which sends more service jobs abroad than anyone else, almost all Indian back office operations have to work at shifts typically running from 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. local time to coincide with the daytime office hours in the United States.
And it’s this working at nights that requires adjusting the biological clock and social practices to a different time, which is turning out to be a major cause for health-related and social problems.
Take the instance of Delhi-based college dropout Sandeep Jain, who was ecstatic when he received a job offer for $150 a month two years ago from a leading Delhi-based call center. This was the chance the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Pink Floyd fan was waiting for.
“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,” he said.
A year later, Sandy, as he called himself for his overseas clients, switched to another call center, which offered him double the money and a training trip to the United States. The training trip was really the carrot for Sandy who had by then begun to tire of the tedium of a help desk job.
But the trip was significant since he could now finally prove to his conservative mother that he too was off to the United States like his “cousins in software.”
But unlike his cousins in software, he soon begun to exhibit behavioral and physiological changes. He had lost 12 pounds in seven months, was smoking over 10 cigarettes a day and drank till he passed out every Friday.
“I am done with it (the back-office job),” he said before giving up his call-center job last December and joining a night college.
“I had lost touch with my relatives. I used to get home at four in the morning and when I woke up, my family was out at work and it was just TV or computer games for me.”
“It was also the monotony of work and boredom that sometimes made me feel suicidal,” Sandy said.
Sandeep is just one of many in the country’s 500,000-strong young work force in India’s back-office sectors who are facing such stress.
“The job is so false,” griped another disgruntled 23-year-old back office worker who eventually also quit his job in a Mumbai call center to pursue higher studies. “You talk like an American, behave like one, but you are not one. It’s almost like a trap.”
“I have had more than a 100 cases of call center 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.”
Indeed, the high degree of dissatisfaction that is fast dawning on Indian back office employees is getting to be a major cause for worry in India’s back office sector, which is billed as one of the country’s most important sectors for economic growth.
In a recent survey of employee satisfaction in what the industry calls Business Process Outsourcing, a staggering 35 percent of respondents said they are likely to leave because they cannot handle the schedule.
The survey also showed something else: Money remains the biggest reason why most people join call centers.
Forty-five percent of all respondents across the industry said they joined up for the money, with another 42 percent adding that they would most likely leave for better opportunities, i.e. read money, elsewhere.
And 27 percent said they would leave either because of work stress or the sheer physical strain that was too much to handle.
Even work related ailments are reality. Sleeping disorders, digestive system disorders and eyesight problems are prevalent.
Rattled by this sudden high level of dissatisfaction and employee dropouts, the country’s back office sector has started to put stress-busters in place and ramp up morale.
Most employers have started holding routine parties on campus and social bonding events within the team to drive away part of the monotony and convey that “the company cares.”
Nishi Roy, a human resource officer, said, “They have started doing everything they can to make a call center a fun place to work in, from hosting parties, contests to taking employees to offsite picnics.”
“The atmosphere is very much like a college. Even our breaks are like those between periods,” says Anurag a 21-year-old just out of college and just two-months into a call center job.
Still, even as the money and the act of donning an American life-style through their working hours continues to be the initial draw for many youngsters in the country’s numerous back offices and call centers, a worry that is looming large is: Would the high social and health costs that the country is paying for raking in billions of dollars, spoil India’s back office party sooner rather than later?
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