Ex-Satyam chief Raju to be CEO of jail BPO?

Mtoday news

HYDERABAD, Oct 28: Disgraced Satyam chief B Ramalinga Raju could be ruing his fate after the Supreme Court on Tuesday cancelled his bail but the apex court’s directive has brought a smile on the face of the state prison chief.

For, the state prisons department is toying with the idea of using Raju’s expertise in handling operations efficiently at the country’s first prison BPO unit, which is all set to start operations on November 1. Though on a trial basis for now, prison officials hope that the BPO venture would benefit from IT czar Raju’s long years of experience in making such projects a profitable venture. Well, this is assuming that his health permits him to stay behind bars and not in a hospital.

 

"We will use his ideas to improve the existing infrastructure and also seek his opinion on how best to utilise manpower available at our unit," said C N Gopinatha Reddy, director general of prisons. This would also keep Raju occupied, added Reddy.

As on date, the BPO unit has its hands full with projects and looks good to work on a few big assignments simultaneously post inauguration. Having already bagged the census data compilation project and the manual digitisation work, talks are now on with a few big names in the banking sector to get more work for the jailbirds manning the prison BPO. Department officials explained that getting associated with projects in the banking sector would involve the BPO workers verifying scanned cheques and related documents. With Raju, who cooked up one of the world’s biggest corporate scams ever, he could well turn into the prison’s best ’in-house’ expert to nit-pick on financial documents.

The prison department has already started negotiations with some banking sector firms in Canada to pocket the first international project for the BPO. The BPO workers for this project too will be required to closely examine scanned documents in various categories. Needless to say, these documents would be of a non-confidential nature, and there is no scope of tampering by the BPO workers, who are all convicted prisoners.

"It will all be done under the supervision of our people, the idea being to make the entire process foolproof," said Reddy. With talks having been finalised between Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Radiant Technologies (the IT firm setting up the BPO), to provide the hardware support for the prison BPO, the authorities are now eyeing a grand formal inauguration of this ambitious unit. The guest list for the inauguration would include Union home minister P Chidambaram, among others.