The accent now is on accents. India’s much touted, English-speaking, back office soldiers who man the 24-hour call centers of multinationals around the world have been getting some flak lately — the problem is that the Indians do not speak their English the way the Americans or the British pronounce their words.

This can be more than just an irritant, as shown by Dell Inc., the world’s largest computer seller that decided to shift its customer support service for corporate clients back to the United States. Earlier, Lehman Brothers also decided to take back its internal computer help desk, outsourced to Indian IT major Wipro, due to the dissatisfaction with the skills offered in India. One of the dissatisfied customers widely quoted in news reports is Ronald Kronk, a Presbyterian minister from Pennsylvania, who said that he spent the last four months trying to solve a problem that resulted in his being billed for two computers.

Kronk has been quoted as saying: “They’re extremely polite, but I call it sponge listening — they just soak it and say, ‘I can understand why you’re angry,’ but nothing happens. I even said to them once that I’d like to speak to someone in the United States. They gave me a number but it’s a recording and I can’t speak to a human being.”

There are even reports of racial screams by customers — “You bloody Indians, you don’t get it, do you?”

These problems, at one level, seem inevitable. In spite of TV and e-mail, people living thousands of miles away and without local knowledge cannot always answer inquiries authoritatively. England is full of jokes about operators in India who master Scots or Midland accents but falter over small physical details. Kate, a doctor based in England, recently on a visit to India, told this correspondent that grappling with rail inquiries in the U.K. can be quite onerous as often the information is incorrect because the person at the other end does not understand the queries.

The fear here, as exemplified by the Dell and Lehman Brothers example, is the doubts that have been creeping in about the quality of the Indian Business and Process Outsourcing — BPO — industry. Indeed, the threat to the BPO industry is generally seen as one of resistance in the developed world to jobs shifting to countries like India. But, there seems to be an increasing consensus in India now that the economic benefits in terms of lower costs are so substantial that firms cannot be prevented from tapping this potential.

Also, the foreign companies should be able to withstand the political backlash at home, which should subside. A recent instance being quoted is the Indiana Senate panel’s refusal to support a sweeping bill to limit foreign workers out of American state contract jobs. Union Commerce and Industries Minister Arun Jaitley said in Parliament that the Indian government has been assured by the U.S. government and industry that they would not approve opposition to business outsourcing to countries like India, brought in through legislation in New Jersey and some other states. The problem lies elsewhere.

The Indian BPO industry has been growing at a mind boggling 60-70 percent annually with revenues growing from $565 million in ’99-00 to almost $2.4 billion in ’02-03. The future projections look brighter — employment to over a million people by 2006, up from the current 200,000. It is said that while the Indian IT industry took 15-20 years to start making its presence felt, the Indian BPO industry has done it in less than 10 years. According to the Indian newspaper Economic Times, call centers account for almost 65-70 percent of the Indian BPO industry in terms of revenues and numbers. And, herein lies the problem: Most of the growth has been at the lower-end of the skill pyramid.

Indeed, according to observers here, dissatisfaction with the quality of manpower here which is employed in relatively less-skilled services could result in an immediate flight of jobs, should even a slight price differential happen. Examples quoted are the trail of Nike shoe manufacturing that moved from South Korea to Malaysia to Indonesia. Another instance is the competition that a country such as Bangladesh provides to Indian export of the lower-end of the garment industry due to lower infrastructure and labor costs. The writing is on the wall: No resting place is permanent. Each is determined by cost effectiveness. India must guard its lead, which is the essence of globalization.

The warning has been sounded by Singapore’s Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong who recently said that the next round of the globalization of jobs might see China, Malaysia and the Philippines competing with India in what Tong called the world’s “information technology and back office.” HSBC, Citibank and Standard Chartered already have service centers in China and Malaysia.

The prescription is two-fold — re-training call center employees adequately to retain the current business as well as moving up the value-chain in terms of the quality of jobs outsourced.

According to Sabira Merchant, speech-voice consultant, “Indians have excellent control over written English, yet when it comes to pronunciation, we do not always sound right.”

Yet, call center executives are confident that business is not going to move in a hurry to other Asian countries. As Prashant Bhardwaj, a manager with a leading call center says, “By the time the other countries produce the required English-speaking manpower, the world will be used to the Indian way of speaking and business won’t shift unless there is a substantial cost differential. A Chinese person speaking English will take a whole lot more time to get used to when Indians are already being spoken to on such a large scale.”

However, experts warn that the Indian BPO strategy that concentrates only on the less-skilled jobs is fraught with risks. At the lower end, competition tends to be entirely in terms of price. And it is quite possible that in the near future countries with much lower labor standards could become price competitive leading to large-scale cuts in wage and infrastructure costs.

The long-term solution to sustaining the ongoing BPO boom will have to provide for opportunities of career growth within the industry and working conditions will have to be kept at levels that keep attrition rates to a minimum, in the face of price competition. The long term-sustainability of the BPO will depend upon the quality of outsourcing, industry-specific training and a constant endeavor to move up the value chain, instead of being counted just by numbers and cost. And inculcating the right diction.