India's first jail BPO to have Satyam's Raju as CEO?
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 28 October 2010, 18:25 IST
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India's first jail BPO to have Satyam's Raju as CEO?
Hyderabad: As the Supreme Court has cancelled the bail granted by Andhra Pradesh High Court, former Satyam chairman B Ramalinga Raju will be going back to jail. At the same time, Prisons Department of Andhra Pradesh is planning to use Raju's expertise in handling operations efficiently at the country's first prison BPO unit, which is set to be operational from November 1, reports Saswati Mukherjee from The Economic Times. The prison officials hope that the BPO venture, which will be on trial basis for now, would benefit from Raju's long years of industry experience to make it as a profitable venture. "We will use his ideas to improve the existing infrastructure and also seek his opinion on how best to utilize manpower available at our unit," the report quoted C N Gopinatha Reddy, Director General of Prisons as saying. This would also keep Raju occupied. The BPO unit has already hands full with projects and looks good to work on a few big assignments simultaneously post inauguration. It has already bagged the census data compilation project and the manual digitisation work, talks are now on with a few big names in the banking sector to get more work for the jailbirds manning the prison BPO. Department officials explained that getting associated with projects in the banking sector would involve the BPO workers verifying scanned cheques and related documents. The prison department has already started negotiations with some banking sector firms in Canada to pocket the first international project for the BPO. The BPO workers for this project too will be required to closely examine scanned documents in various categories. These documents would be of a non-confidential nature, and there is no scope of tampering by the BPO workers, who are all convicted prisoners. "It will all be done under the supervision of our people, the idea being to make the entire process foolproof," said Reddy. With talks having been finalized between Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Radiant Technologies (the IT firm setting up the BPO), to provide the hardware support for the prison BPO, the authorities are now eyeing a grand formal inauguration of this ambitious unit.

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