Although it is midnight, the place is buzzing with activity as row upon row of young men and women sit under telephone headsets handling all kinds of customers, from those who want insurance policies to one who has been wrongly billed for a vase.

The site is the call centre of Indian IT firm Wipro Spectramind, one of a growing number of such units being set up by corporate groups and which are transforming India into the back office of the world.

With an army of skilled English-speaking college graduates available for wages far below those of US college dropouts, leading global firms such as GE, HSBC (Holdings) Plc. and Dell Computers are turning to India for back office work.

"There is a worldwide slowdown and low cost is very much the name of the game. It is one of the main drivers and gives us confidence that we will grow," Wipro Spectramind chief operating officer Devashish Ghosh told AFP.

In the three years since its launch, Wipro Spectramind -- India's leading IT back office firm -- has grown to log annual revenues of 41 million dollars.

And the more than 50 percent growth in the industry's annual revenues has meant that one of the biggest challenges is managing and maintaining a burgeoning workforce, said managing director Raman Roy.

India's premier IT body, the National Association for Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), said this year the increase in developed countries' labour costs and the global economic slowdown was forcing them to downsize and cut costs.

This would attract a larger number of global firms to India for offshore work, it said.

Global consultancy firm McKinsey and Company said in a recent report that offshore outsourcing for back office IT work from India was expected to grow by 60 percent to 2.4 billion dollars' turnover in the fiscal year ending March

However Wipro Spectramind's Ghosh said banking on low costs alone was risky and so the firm was offering a package of value-added services such as helping others develop better systems and analyzing customer data.

Indian industry experts said the country's strong base in information technology would help it to leverage even more back office work, as Wipro Spectramind was doing.

They highlighted the example of Indian IT services company HCL Technologies which recently secured a 160-million-dollar contract from British Telecom to start offshore work which includes telemarketing, billing and conferencing.

Its 3,000-seat centre to be set up on the outskirts of New Delhi will be staffed with software data analysts and engineers, apart from call centre executives.

The relatively new industry has a handful of players in India such as Wipro Spectramind and Daksh, but the high revenue growth is attracting other powerful companies, including India's largest private telecom firm, the Bharti group.

Amid the optimism about the sector's growth in India, the one point of concern is political opposition to outsourcing back office work to protect jobs, sector analysts said.

In New Jersey, in the United States, legislation to stop government contracts in IT from being outsourced to other countries is being considered.

NASSCOM chairman Kiran Karnik said the association was trying to work with the US industry to explain that worldwide experience had shown companies only stood to gain from outsourcing, by improving their efficiency and helping to add to their profits.

"They definitely benefit from outsourcing," Karnik said.

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