India has emerged as the world's most attractive ITES destination on account of two factors; Location attractiveness (Investment in infrastructure, Liberalized telecom sector and friendly regulatory environment) and People attractiveness (large and low cost pool of English literate graduates).

However, while this large talent pool will be a good source for associate level manpower, the people managing this large talent pool will also need to be developed. In other words, a section of the work force will have to be groomed for Front-Line management roles. This is imperative for the following reasons:

1. The NASSCOM McKinsey Report 2002 estimates that the total number of people employed in the ITES-BPO sector will reach one million by 2008. Assuming that about 85%, or 850,000 of these will be at the associate level, the number of team leaders required would be in the range of 60,000 to 85,000 (at a ratio of about 15:1 to 10:1, the ratio varying from case to case) and the number of Quality Analysts will be around 34,000 (at a ratio of about 25:1).
2. The Indian ITES-BPO sector is witnessing a boom. The tremendous entrepreneurial energies being channeled to this industry have ensured that the industry has taken off smoothly. However, building on its initial success is a real challenge for the industry - in its current state the industry does not have the bandwidth to manage its explosive growth.
3. The key issue facing the industry is to deliver high quality and productivity, and simultaneously scale up at a frantic pace. This underlines the critical importance of process management. It is the Front-Line Management that performs the critical supervisory and operations management roles, and is therefore in charge of the key customer related processes. These managers would therefore be crucial to the business since they would ensure the delivery excellence that is the USP of the Indian ITES-BPO industry.
4. The existence of a Front-Line Management layer would help to provide a growth path to associate level staff. This would help the industry to evolve as a long-term career option for the associate level staff. This in turn would reduce attrition at lower levels and help the industry achieve high ROI on the investment on training and development.