NEW DELHI — The call center job came with a good salary and good perks, especially compared to many other opportunities for young people in India.
But as 26-year-old Vaibhav Vats says, it was doing him no good. His weight grew to 265 pounds and long overnight hours gave him little time for a social life. Eventually, he quit.
"You are making nice money. But the trade-off is also big," said Vats, who spent nearly two years at an IBM Corp. call center handling customer calls from the United States.
Call centers and other outsourced businesses -- such as software writing, medical transcription and back-office tasks -- employ more than 1.6 million people in India, mostly in their 20s and 30s. But at this young age, they face sleep disorders, heart disease, depression and family discord, according to doctors and several industry surveys.
Experts say the brewing crisis could undermine the success of India's hugely profitable outsourcing industry, which earns billions of dollars annually and has shaped much of the country's transformation into an emerging economic power.
Heart disease, strokes and diabetes cost India an estimated $9 billion in lost productivity in 2005. The losses could grow to a staggering $200 billion over the next 10 years if corrective action is not taken quickly, said a study by the New Delhi-based Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations.
The outsourcing industry would be hardest hit, the study found.
Reliable estimates of the number of people affected are hard to come by, but government officials and experts agree that it is a growing problem. Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss wants to enforce a special health policy for employees in the information technology industry.
"After working, they party for the rest of the time," he said. "We don't want these young people to burn out."
Most call center jobs involve responding to phone calls through the night from customers in the United States and Europe, some of whom can be angry and rude. It's monotonous and there is little meaningful personal interaction among co-workers.
"There are times when the stress is so overwhelming that they fail to cope with it," said Archana Bisht, who started a counseling company -- 1to1help.net -- in Bangalore six years ago.
Her clientele now includes 25 companies -- seven of them were added in the last two months -- including such names as Intel Corp., IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and MindTree Consulting Ltd.
