21 Jun 16 Digital India to drive BPM growth

This July will witness the completion of one year since the central government launched the ‘Digital India’ initiative to usher in a digital revolution in the country. A recent report published by NASSCOM in collaboration with ValueNotes – Domestic BPM Market 2016: On the Cusp of Transformation – estimates that schemes like e-governance, e-Kranti and ‘Information for all’ are expected to result in a demand for business process management (BPM) services of INR 500-600 crore by 2020!

Apart from this, there are various other initiatives that are being taken by the central and state

governments which include management of income taxes, maintenance of voter IDs, registration of companies, digitization of land records, birth and death certificates, driving licenses, etc.

If we were to consider the Indian Railways as well, then the opportunity would be even larger – customer centric BPM services such as ticket issuance, contact centres, maintenance of Wi-Fi, and lounge services on railway platforms are expected to drive growth for domestic BPM market in India.

To enable electronic delivery of citizen services, the government will need to establish contact centres with multilingual capabilities to help first-time customers in using digital services, citizens applying for passports, PAN cards, Aadhar cards, etc. Large BPM providers who are able to deliver multilingual voice-based services from limited centres are expected to benefit from this demand.

However, the larger piece of the pie (of the government BPM opportunity) lies in low value non-voice related services owing to the massive e-governance project run by both central and state governments. As this work is expected to be ad hoc and regional in nature, small unorganized BPM providers who have a regional presence will be better positioned to cater to the demand for services such as scanning, digitization and data entry.

While there exists a huge BPM opportunity in the government sector, an intensive change management will be required at both central and state governments to create a more open mind set for contracting third-party BPM providers to execute these citizen services efficiently.