/CORRECTED REPEAT/DEVELOPMENT-INDIA: Well-paid, ‘Backroom’ IT Jobs for the Once Unemployable

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Oct 16 2000 (IPS) - Reshmi, a young woman living in the Indian capital city, had never imagined that the Hollywood films she skipped college classes to see, would one day help her earn a living.

The 25-year-old divorcee could not clear her graduate examination. But her familiarity with American English accents, got her a job, which pays many times more than someone with her educational qualifications could have hoped to earn in this country.

She is paid 500 U.S. dollars a month for transcribing notes dictated by busy medical practitioners in the United States. Reshmi is a ‘medical transcriptor’ — one of several such jobs, which are being farmed out, with the help of information technology (IT), from rich nations to low cost providers in countries like India.

For lack of time, doctors in the United States dictate notes into voice recorders. The voice is then transferred with the help of IT to medical transcriptors like Reshmi.

“It is easy money because all I have to do is spend a few hours each day listening to medical records dictated by U.S doctors into computer files and keying in what I hear, ready to be e-mailed back,” says Reshmi.

She works at one of the 50-odd medical transcription units that have sprung up all over New Delhi. Many of these are hole in the wall establishments, with transcriptors like Reshmi sitting before computers, earphones clamped on their heads, working 24 hours a day in shifts.

But such is the potential of the industry, that trans-national corporations (TNCs) and top Indian business houses are now setting up well-equipped units even as new IT training institutes are coming up to offer courses in medical transcription.

Two months ago, a big pharmaceutical company ‘Max India’, acquired majority stakes in the Indian subsidiary of the U.S.-based, ‘Health Scribe Inc.’ for nearly nine million dollars. The company announced plans to train 5,000 professionals to cope with the business.

Max India also has plans to invest in other IT-enabled services, which cater to clients in the U.S., such as call-centres, back office operations, insurance claim processing, revenue accounting, billing and data entry.

In recent years, India, with its large pool of English language- speaking people, has emerged as a big draw for U.S. companies, which find that using IT they can get jobs done in this country at a fraction of their cost in the United States.

“In the United States, the majority of people rely on insurance companies to settle their medical bills, and in order to get claims settled, doctors and hospitals need to quickly submit detailed reports of cases to insurance companies,” says Marina Thomas who trains medical transcriptors.

According to Thomas, U.S. doctors want the transcribed notes back within 12 hours. India’s geographical location gives it an advantage because of an ideal time difference with the United States.

Initially, most U.S. medical transcription jobs were sourced from Mexico, Israel and Ireland. While Mexico lacked enough English-speakers, the others charged high fees. The business began shifting a few years ago to cheaper markets in the Philippines and the Indian sub-continent.

However, the unregulated growth of medical transcription units in India, which in turn sub-contract jobs, is turning out to be a problem, says Thomas. “In such circumstances, quality could suffer and the business shift to other countries,” she says.

Thomas teaches at the ‘Pan-American Institute of Medical Transcription’, which trains people to work in big, well-equipped medical transcription establishments. There are only two such units in the Indian capital, she says. “Too many of the others are fly-by-night operations,” she says.

The transcription units have mushroomed despite technical hurdles to IT efficiency in India, which affect the transmission of computer voice files to India.

“India desperately needs quick implementation of a robust telecom infrastructure and internet friendly policies,” says Dewang Mehta, the high-profile chief of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM).

Mehta also faults India’s slow moving bureaucracy, for holding up the full development of the IT industry’s potential in India, which NASSCOM estimates, could earn 50 billion dollars in foreign exchange annually, by the year 2008.

“For example, India is the only country seeking to ban ‘voice-over-Internet’, while global telecom giants are investing in long-distance voice network technology, which is indispensable to the IT-enabled sector,” says Mehta.