In a story about Indian call centers last week, National Public Radio's All Things Considered cited a report from an Indian think tank that called the call center industry a waste of educated young people's skills. The report by the VV Giri National Labor Institute, a government research group, calls call center or Business Process Outsourcer (BPO) workers "cyber coolies" who are under closer watch than the inmates of a 19th century prison or a Roman slave ship.

In a rebuttal entitled "Roman slaves would have given an arm and a leg to swap places with today's BPO employees", Financial Express's Mythili Bhusnurmath says India needs call centers. Interviewed on NPR, Ms. Bhusnurmath said the VV Giri report gave "an armchair view of the industry." Sure, there are some bad centers, she concedes, but the majority of them are good places to work with ten people "clamoring to get in" for every one that leaves.

The president of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions agrees that all call centers are not bad places to work, but he says unionization of the centers would help enforce labor laws.

More than 170,000 Indians work in call centers, and according to some sources, most of them are college graduates.

In other India call center news, fierce competition in call center recruitment agencies has led to corruption. The Telegraph of Calcutta reports that some agencies, which get a fee for every new employee placed, are defrauding both call centers and potential recruits; other agencies are fake. In one scheme, a recruitment agency will convince an applicant to pay for three months of training on the promise that a job awaits upon completion. The applicant may never find out that the interview they had was with an agency employee posing as a call center manager. Another scheme involves recruiting drives in which agencies charge a fee for applying, and then disappear.

--Harry Sheff