In a communication to DoT, National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) president Dewang Mehta said, "this is very important for faster proliferation of international call centres in the country which will be a great source of export revenue and employment, while encouraging software companies to enable their employees work as teleworkers."

The allocation and commissioning of approval for call centres should be done on a priority basis, according to him. This framework can be further augmented by setting up a single window clearance mechanism to minimise the time taken in approval and provision of high-speed datacom link to just two or three weeks instead of six months.

While welcoming the overall guidelinesannounced by DoT last month, Mehta pointed out that much more needs to be done to make the policy successful.

"For example, DoT should ensure that there is 100 per cent uptime of the datacom link for the call centres. Even a drop rate of one per cent can be disastrous for the business in today's world. By its very nature, a call centre must have constant uptime as it requires real-time interactions with its customers. Smallest of downtime can lead to customers placing liability claims," he told The Financial Express.

As per the international norms, a carrier generally agrees to quality of service levels with guaranteed uptime.

Mehta urged DoT that domestic call centres be allowed to do international business to take full advantage of the 12-hour time difference between India and the US. "If this is done, boosting the call centre business out of India will become much easier," said Mehta.

He also felt that DoT should offer special pricing for international bandwidth used for the call centres toencourage forex earnings and employment generation. A special tariff can lead to an exponential surge in both domestic and foreign investment in this sector, he felt. "Also, two or more companies should be allowed to use the same line to optimise the utilisation of internet and the call centre," said Mehta.

Nasscom has recognised IT-enabled services as a major thrust area. "It is expected to emerge as a major driver in our efforts to turn in $50 billion of annual software export revenue by the year 2008," he said. As per Nasscom's estimates, IT-enabled services is expected to earn Rs 81,00 crore of annual revenues resulting in the creation of more than 11 lakh additional jobs by 2008.