Call Centres

A country that takes pride in its educated youth is now on the verge of going the western way. With the surge of call centres which require just 12th grade as minimum qualification, more and more students are quitting college and taking up jobs in call centres. The lure of money and independence that can be derived from it is luring the youth away from college.

The call centre generation is a generation of youth worn the ages of eighteen to twenty-five. They are a generation of cellphone wielding, coke drinking, fast food eating, designer jean wearing and label conscious youth that live with their parents and spend all their money in maintaining their lifestyles. They work odd hours and hence end up with workmates as friends with no scope for interaction with the outside world. Lots of bars have opened in the vicinity of these call centres and the kids just walk out of work at odd hrs and walk in to these watering holes. Where else would you go at two in the morning?

The alarming dropout rate from college is cause for concern. It means an entire generation of youth aspiring to take up jobs that require hardly any skills. What will happen to this generation when these call center jobs will be taken over by computers? Voice recognition is already a reality and it is only a matter of time before the call centre jobs will be fully automated. While the call centres have provided jobs to thousands of youth thus keeping them away from crime, they have also reduced them to robots that just log in to and log out of work. If the call centres raise their criteria to university graduates, at least, some if not all of these kids would complete their graduation and might have a chance at taking up work that unlike call centres is long term and satisfying.