Students who are selected by Daksh for pre-process and on-the-job internship can actually pay for the Hero Mindmine training course through the stipend they receive.

While the tie-up obviously lends business benefits to both companies, it is likely to spin off a trend in ITES training, dictated by market needs. According to a recent Nasscom-McKinsey survey on the ITES industry, third-party ITES providers (who comprise a significant chunk in India) need to manage their talent pipeline better. First and foremost this would call for an improvement in the quality of intake through tie-ups with training schools and institutes.

The report says the cost of replacing a knowledge worker is estimated at 1.5-2 times the cost of his salary. Agrees Asheesh Gupta, business head, Hero Mindmine, "According to our own estimates, if a company hires a raw person, it would have to spend Rs 20,000-Rs 30,000 to give him high quality skills required in a voice-based call centre. Whereas a trained person would need only some project-specific training at one-fourth of the earlier expenditure."

While the internship at Daksh would be for a minimum of 12 weeks the stipend would be Rs 6,600 per month during the pre-process training (normally 3 weeks) and Rs 7,500 per month for the on-job training (nine weeks). According to Nasscom-McKinsey, the ITES industry has grown at 70% per annum over the last two years -a rate significantly higher than the 44% annual growth rate required to reach the original goal of $17 billion by 2008.

However, if the industry has to hire 60,000 people a year, the training institutes would at best be able to supply 3,000 quality manpower. The rest would have to be trained in soft skills - languages, accent skills, complaints handling; technical skills - computer systems, biological research; functional skills - customer care, tele-marketing, secretarial services.