The Brits are in town!

As my usual search phrases, "call centre" crawled across Internetia, this is what they came up with:
(The article is from 2004 by the way!)

Indian outsourcer imports Brits

Indian outsourcer GTL is evaluating its local staff by importing British graduates to work as agents at its Pune call centre.

The 10 graduates from Britain will join GTL’s Pune staff of 500 and will work on par with their Indian counterparts at a salary of 150 pounds (US$268) per month and a contract that affords them two months paid leave after ten months of work to travel around India. "The only thing extra that we are providing them is shared accommodation in the city," GTL senior vice-president Pradeep Phadke said.

Phadke told reporters the project was a "bench-marking exercise". "Our main objective is to find out the performance of a British employee vis-a-vis his Indian counterpart, while servicing the same client. We are interested in knowing whether the former is more effective than the Indian in selling the company. Secondly, the aim is to have an informal inter-mingling of the people from both the countries for a better understanding of the cultures, mindsets and accents."