The Government of India has recently announced guidelines relaxing provisions for Other service providers (OSPs) which will help the technology industry to adopt permanent ‘work-from-home’ and ‘work-from-anywhere’ policies.
OSPs refer to companies in services such as tele-banking, tele-medicine, tele-trading and e-commerce.
According to the new guidelines, the registration requirement for OSPs has been done away with and BPO companies engaged in data-related work have been excluded from the ambit of OSP regulations. This has removed compliance and financial burden on the industry and facilitated work from anywhere.
Additionally, requirements such as deposit of bank guarantees, static IPs, frequent reporting obligations, publication of network diagrams and penal provisions have also been removed.
The relaxations were lauded by the industry. Nasscom termed the move as a bold reform for ITES/BPO players.
“These will provide several benefits…India is a global outsourcing hub and the new guidelines will promote outsourcing at scale, bringing in more work to India. With the relaxation in WFH regulations, companies will be able to tap into talent from small towns and remote parts of the country,” NASSCOM Senior Director and Public Policy Head Ashish Aggarwal said.
Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani tweeted, “The reforms of Other Service Provider regulations for BPO/BPM industry is breath-taking in its simplicity. Truly a case of dramatic Ease of Business in the digital world!”
With these reforms, the government aims at attracting big investments and generating jobs. It is expected that these reforms for the tech companies will double the size of the $37 billion Business Process Management (BPM) sector.
“Committed to furthering ‘Ease of Doing Business’ and making India a tech hub! GoI has significantly simplified Other Service Provider (OSP) guidelines of the Telecom Department. Compliance burdens of BPO industry will be greatly reduced due to this,” PM Modi tweeted.
The explosion of digital platforms in the post-Covid-19 world will create new opportunities for IT-enabled services. This explosion will be worth millions of jobs in the next few years. The announced reforms by the government of India can help the country to tap this job creation potential of the digital explosion.
Komal is an English literature student with a keen interest in economic developments and politics amongst others. She is a part of Research & Content team at HrNxt.com