Team Lease Ltd., a Bangalore-based firm, said during its 18-months of operations it had on its list more than 50 clients including Intel, Accenture, Du Pont, Lufthansa Airlines and large domestic corporations.

"During the last fiscal year we earned 100 million rupees and outsourced 800 people. The revenues will triple during the current fiscal year (to March ," said Ashok Reddy, managing director of the company.

"The total market in India for temporary staff is about 15,000 and we have employed about 2,000 up to August this year. The potential market is about 10 million and growth will be exponential," Reddy said.

"By the end of this (fiscal) year Team Lease will place about 5,000 people," he said adding most of the jobs would be created by domestic corporations such as the Reliance group, India's largest private firm.

Team Lease has a database of more than 100,000 people who have enrolled on its portal and are searching for jobs.

The firm, with offices in six major Indian cities, has also subscribed to job portals such as Monsterjobs.com which gives us an additional 1.2 million potential employees, Reddy said.

He said foreign and Indian corporations were looking to cut costs and according to a study done in the US can make cost savings of up to 50 percent by employing temporary staff.

Term Lease charges a service fee of about 15 percent on each of the employees based on his salary, which Reddy said ranges from 6,000 rupees to 35,000 rupees.

The company identifies a corporation's staffing needs, calculates and maintains its payroll and bank and employee records, imparts training and monitors on-site employee work performance.

US-based technology research house Gartner Inc said during the current year India's revenues from offshore business process outsourcing (BPO) would grow from slightly under one billion dollars to 1.2 billion dollars.

This will represent 66 percent of the global offshore market -- where jobs are done outside the client's region, Gartner said.

A lot of foreign firms such as airlines, credit card companies and banks have shifted their "back-office" work to India which has the world's second largest pool of English-speaking computer literates after the United States.

Last year the BPO sector accounted for about one-fourth of India's total software export revenues of 9.5 billion dollars.

SPACE.WIRE