Drukonnet declined to talk to Kuensel.

TST Systems is using 2 mbp broadband from Bhutan Telecom and pays Nu 300,000 as monthly fee, which experts say, in the context of call centres, is expensive for such low connectivity.

Karma Tshering and Chabilal Bastola of the department of information and technology (DIT) said that they were trying to bring in fibre optic links for greater bandwaves and that talks were underway with the Indian government. Bhutan’s steep terrain was one of the main difficulties in trying to instal a fibre optic network in the country.

“It would be very expensive to take these cables all the way from Bhutan to the sea to connect to submarine cables,” the two DIT officials said.

India has optic fibre cables upto Hashimara near Siliguri and Bhutan is still negotiating with India to use them. Bhutan Telecom is negotiating with Reliance and the government with VSNL in India.

Meanwhile, several employees of one of the yet-to-be established call centres in Thimphu want to look for other decent paying jobs in the market.

Recruited by the call centre with promises of about Nu 7,000 a month as salary, after the completion of a six-month training, in which they were paid Nu 3,000 a month, the company has extended the training period by another six months. This means they will continue to earn the Nu 3,000 stipend. Trainees grumble that the money is not enough to sustain themselves in Thimphu. The company has given its reason to the department of human resource as “the trainees being not yet ready” for production.

Kuensel was told by the trainees, that even if they wanted to leave, they couldn’t because their original documents have been retained by the company.

“Most of our friends, who left, had to come back because they didn’t have their original documents to look for another job,” said one of the trainees.

The trainees, some of them say, are stuck with the company because, according to Karma Lhazom, a department of human resource official, “the trainees have signed an agreement with the company, which states that the training period could be extended, and if one wishes to leave, the training costs should be repaid to the company.”

According to Karma Lhazom, Drukonnet had initially recruited 151 trainees.

In India, the BPO trend started primarily in the technology area - operating and manning remote technical helpdesk teams, application and network monitoring services among other offerings. There are 185 Fortune 500 companies that are currently outsourcing to India. TCS, Wipro Technologies and Infosys Technologies are among the top 15 outsourcing vendors in the world.