Indians in Thane BPO vet American job-seekers

THANE: A scholar studying the quirks of globalization might look no further than a glitzy office at Ghodbunder Road in Thane, where young men and women spend the night working on criminal verification for American companies.


This means that when a company in America decides to hire, say, a man called Tom Jones, the office in Ghodbunder road pores over criminal records of all the Tom Joneses in the relevant jurisdiction of the US in a bid to check whether the man being hired has a criminal record.

Private firms in America aren't the only ones outsourcing employee background checks. The US government began outsourcing background clearances after privatising the US Investigative Services Inc (USIS) nearly two decades ago. Federal clearances and background investigations for US government employees cost the tax-payer $1 billion last year, and are expected to cost $1.2 billion by 2014, reports Bloomberg. The USIS website mentions that the company, head-quartered in Falls Church, Virginia, has over 6,000 employees "who support business operations in all 50 states, US territories, and overseas."

Much like the US government, American corporates have outsourced the business of verifying their employees to other American corporates. The office in Thane that carries out verifications is part of a transnational company headquartered in New York, which carries out the process of criminal verification for firms around the world. So a company in the US which wants to hire a prospective employee first approaches the verification company in America, which then passes on some of the work to its office in Thane.

The youngsters in Thane carrying out the verification work through the night align their office hours with the US day. The office in Thane receives files from vendors in the US, who access the information using the social security numbers of the prospective employees. Sometimes, the vendors carry out the verification and the Thane office simply cross-checks the data after calling various courts in the US. Employment details, education qualifications and drug abuse are also verified.

For cheer-leaders of globalization, a glass-and-steel office off a dusty Indian highway, carrying out criminal verification for US companies confirm a belief that the world is flat. Critics point to the asymmetries between countries that result in uneven geographies and spawn such odd phenomena.

Raman Roy, widely credited as the father of the Indian BPO sector, sees nothing odd with the criminal verification of an employee in one country being carried out in another."Whether it's verifying an employee's background, providing financial services, advising patients based on medical records or decoding the nature of a molecule, as long as the data-bases are available, the process can be outsourced," says Roy.