Youth As Call Centre Agents: A Sociological Description
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Abstract
As vans with tinted windows creep at night into middle-class, urban neighbourhoods in India, spiriting away young men and women to work until dawn at multinational call centres. Following the dot-com boom in India in the nineties the phenomenal success of BPOs, particularly call centres, continues in 2023, offering high-school and college English-speaking graduates quick employment with comparatively high wages. Through empirical research, this article addresses the transformation of Indian urban labour into a global proletariat. The paper explores the socio-economic background of call centre employees working in Gurgaon. It makes a sociological analysis to ascertain the social, economic, and family background of call centre employees and their level of education—impact on health. Based on a structured interview schedule, the study selected 300 employees working at six call centres as the primary data.
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