Chennai: India is becoming a hot destination for outsourced e-publishing work since the country's firms are charging a sixth of the prices prevailing in the West, an seminar organised by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has found.

The industry is growing at an annual rate of 35 percent, experts said.

"Our outsourcing opportunities in the value-added and core services such as copy editing, project management, indexing, media services and content deployment will help us make the publishing BPO ventures worth $1.46 billion by 2010," said Sriram Subramanya, vice-chhairman of CII Puducherry.

Despite India becoming a highly sought after destination for publishing majors abroad, the available human resource is one of the major constraints, Subramanya told IANS.

"My organisation is developing talent amongst homemakers in Puducherry to combat dropouts from jobs after extensive training. Our in-house training facilities turn out at least 1,000 fully equipped persons."

"The entry level pay of Rs.10,000 is very good and this quadruples with the passage of time and acquirement of skills. Thanks to our success, Chennai too is becoming a sought after destination."