A study on Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) sector shows a huge supply gap that threatens to cripple its growth. Rocsearch, a UK-based research services company, has gathered evidence suggesting that the KPO market may just about reach a size of $5 billion by 2010, manned by 100,000 people instead of projections of a $12 billion market supported by 250,000 employees. This accentuates Nasscom's projections of a shortfall of 500,000 workers in ITES and BPO sectors by 2010.
For example, all the 2,000-odd IIM and top 10 B-School graduates are employable, while less than half the 84,000 graduates from Tier-II B-Schools would make the grade. The study sees only 500,000 of the over 3 million workers added to the labour pool in 2006s employable in global firms and of these, just 2 in every 100 are likely to opt for work in knowledge space.