By Team Mangalorean, Bangalore

Hubli/Bangalore, January 16, 2008: The tale of India's revolution in Information Technology is now a legend. After covering the cities with its opportunities, things have started moving towards rural areas, thanks to G.V. Bhat the first bunch of outsourced 'off line' jobs have reached the rural youngsters. G.V. Bhat who hails from Sirsi in Uttara Kannada has already gainfully employed 10 youngsters on Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). They have started on data entry jobs and transferring scanned images into Office and word pad documents, which he says was a simple job but the workload is enough to sustain ten youngsters for now.

G. V. Bhat says that it all started as a simple idea. "A group of friends all of them educated to certain level began looking for jobs in Sirsi but there were not any forthcoming and since I had some connections in Bangalore city, my friends started asking me if they can get any jobs in Bangalore. But I knew with the level of skill they had they could not survive in Bangalore for long neither can they afford to stay in the great city with their earning. So I decided to approach the companies in the city of Bangalore and take the back office work to Sirsi".

After running around in the city for a long time Bhat could get positive reply from only one company - Onsoft Technologies of Bangalore which came as such a big encouragement to the rural unemployed youth. What started as a small typing job has now become a multi task job line up. There are now ten machines, a hired 'production centre' and ten rural educated unemployed youth comprising of both men and women working in two shifts. Each of them earn not less than Rs.3500 per month on a 'slot basis' says Bhat.

Speaking to Mangalorean.com, Bhat said this could be one of the ways to stop the youth migrating into big cities in search of jobs. The youth working with him have told him that Rs. 3500 was better in their own towns rather than earning 10,000 in Bangalore or any other big cities. Mr. Bhat who had some insight into the Self Expression & Leadership Program (SELP) found that the educated manpower available in villages and small towns are totally untapped and under utilized. He plans to develop an alternative business model for tapping these resources. According to him, a business venture in small town is very cost effective. "Low cost of infrastructure, availability of skilled manpower, low attrition rate, reasonable compensation packages were some of the advantages of this business opportunity," he asserts.

He claims to have trained 20 persons already in the past three weeks. He plans to extend the soft skills training to at least 100 persons from his hometown. He has booked all the cyber centers in the town to impart this training. He states that his mission is to spread this awareness and opportunity to all the small towns in Karnataka. The revolution has already begun as he has been getting inquiries from groups of youth from towns such as Hassan, Haveri, Badami and some small towns in Mysore district that if he could help them replicating this model in their towns.

He said when he approached various banks sometime back they had found out that this model would not work and it was financially unviable and refused to give him any loan. But a week back when one of the bank managers visited the 'production centre' he was impressed and has given some guidelines to get the bank to finance his project. One of the beneficiaries of this project Pragathi of Sirsi speaking to our correspondent said that the system Mr. Bhat has created has a good potential as the educated unemployed youth could get some work in their own places.