The KPO scene in the country.

What do we exact;y mean by KPO?

We are all aware of BPO (Business Process Outsourcing). A layman associates BPO with call centers. However, it is much more than that. Operations or processes which doesnt involve high end skills can be outsourced to low cost countries. The basic motive of these jobs is to cut costs and result in insignificant impact on the parent companies bottomline. The people hired in these BPO jobs are young people just out of college or in some cases even studying in some colleges. Frankly speaking, they are presently unemployable in any field. For them, a BPO job gives them much needed cash and a job gives them somewhat amount of respectibility in the society. Its a win win situation for both the companies and the young, just out of college guy. The companies reduce their costs whereas the guy gets some money. Infusion of some foreign currency in this way helps the Indian economy. Consumption goes up and so does inflation. The mood of the country which is mainly governed by the mood of the youngsters in a relatively young country like ours remains joyous and optimistic. A general feeling of well being encompasses us all.

Now, lets focus on the KPO sector. They employ a bit better skilled people than the BPO firms. In India the KPOs mainly consist of financial firms doing analytical work, equity research etc. Many of the big banks have set up their captive units out here. They typically employ statisticians, economists, lawyers, financial analysts and engineers too. Please note that they pay good to very good remuneration.
Similarly skilled people are a scarcity in the developed world and they also cost a lot more compared to here. They also hire from the elite institutions like IITs and IIMs. The people who get employed with them get a headstart in their career in terms of the salary they command. Moreover, working for a captive unit of a big bank gives them the oppurtunity to add the value of a big brand on their CV.
Everything looks hunky dowry in the above scenario, isnt it?

There is one significant point which was not addressed above. The quality of the work. Please understand that the basic premise of the business model is cost reduction. The best brains havent been hired because they can do a better work compared to their "onshore analyst counterparts", they have been hired because they come at a far lesser cost. In a typical such model you have a onshore analyst to which a team or an offshore analyst gets attached to. The onshore guy is responsible for delegating work to the people out here, who after completing it send it back to them. It is these onshore analysts who interact with the business, understand their needs and then finally try to provide a solution. Look at the thing from the perspective of an onshore analyst. He will want to get rid of the necessary but tedious work. The more tedious and lowgrade it is, the higher is it's probability of getting outsourced. The idea is to standardise and automate the process as far as possible so that chances of manual intervention are minimised. Then this "process" of running the job/ creating the report/ running the process can be sent over to India.

It is sent over to India in the garb of exciting work in so and so domain. Often it is in the garb of "I Banks".
When good quality students get such a job, they are initially lured by good money and brand name. However, once the initial attraction of money goes, people tend to see through this model. They try to find a way to get out of this system. However, what options do they have? Switching jobs will take them from one KPO to another, one process to another. Switching fields means they need to start from scratch in the new field. Here, they would fail to take advantage of the brand name they presently have on their cv. Front end jobs are also beyond their reach as banks dont want people who have been running mere processes irrespective of what they have done before that. This is a strange type of situation which many of the grads from elite institutions are nowadays facing.

In such a situation, the companies dont have too much attrition. Moreover, as the process is almost standardised they can afford to let go of these employees. Often during the initial interview stage the onshore analysts understand that a certain guy may be over qualified for the job and hence will get frustrated in quick time. However, they still hire him as "by the time, the guy realises, that the job was not meant for him, he would have been somemonths into it, set up the entire thing to run smoothly and hence served their purpose." The challenge is the highest whenever a new thing is set up from scratch. It is is during this stage that quality people come in handy. However, once the process matures, you can do away with the expensive elite grad and hire less expensive people from lower wrung schools.

This is entirely from first hand experience with no element of fiction whatsoever in this. All graduates, joining KPOs please be sure of your work profile. The profile of the job is the most important thing and unless you find it interesting there is no point in taking it up.