Business process outsourcing and call centre jobs are increasingly being sent to low-wage nations by American firms, but the nation to register highest growth in BPO jobs will be India, says Datamonitor, a London-based research firm.

Datamonitor says that of the 110,000 jobs outsourced from one country to another, at the end of last year, 63,000 of those jobs came to India.

The research firm says that the total number of call centre jobs to be outsourced by 2007 is likely to increase to 241,000. Of these, about 121,000 jobs will come to India.

• India and Outsourcing: Complete Coverage

Although American call centres are not in danger of being wiped out, Datamonitor says that the expansion of the industry would have hit a dead end. Once flourishing, call centres now are dwindling, a trend that is already threatening thousands of jobs.

Currently, there are about 50,600 American call centres employing about 2.9 million people. Datamonitor expects the number of US call centres to fall to 47,500 by 2008, with 2.7 million employees.

Because of lower wages overseas, technological advances and tough regulations, call centre jobs are exiting the United States. Most of the jobs are moving to countries like India, the Philippines, Mexico, Russia and Canada, where the wages are lower. An American call centre worker is paid about $10 an hour, while for the same job a worker in India is paid $1.20 an hour.

This results in huge savings for companies engaged in outsourcing. Jobs in IT, financial services, insurance, legal support, human resources and medical transcription work have also been moved to India.

Aviva made headlines being one of the first groups to set up call centres in India in 2002. Prudential followed, launching a call centre in Mumbai and moved one third of its 3,000 UK-based customer service jobs. Soon thereafter, HSBC sent 4,000 British jobs to India. Barclays, National Rail Enquiries and many US-based Fortune 500 companies too have joined the bandwagon.

Giants like Microsoft, Oracle, AOL, Amex already route customer service calls to India.