Infrastructure services equally important to develop economy:

'Sri Lanka has skilled and talented HR base'

Ramani KANGARAARACHCHI

Wasantha Kumara Picture by Sumanachandra Ariyawansa

There was a time when only the manufacturing sector was considered important but things have changed and now it is considered that infrastructure services are also equally important to develop the economy. Sri Lanka has a skilled and talented human resource base in various infrastructure services in diverse fields such as telecommunication, electronic, electrical or information technology. They all perform well for the betterment of the country.

Managing Director Vantage Micro Systems (VMS) K.M. Wasantha Kumara of Homagama is a young expert in LV Electrical systems for commercial and high rise buildings and residential houses with wide knowledge and experience locally and overseas. He has a strong enthusiasm to explore the huge potential in BPO industry in Sri Lanka. He was interviewed by Daily News Business.

An old boy of Ananda Vidyalaya Elpitiya, Wasantha was the second child in a family of six children. After successfully completing the GCE Advanced Level examination he entered the Sri Jayawardenapura University and obtained a BSc degree. He has passed his IESL examinations in Electronic Engineering and City and Guilds London Institute Examinations in Telecommunication.

"As an undergraduate, I worked part time in a communication company for four years and it was a big advantage for me to gain experience", he said. Because of this technical background I got the opportunity to work for a company in Saudi Arabia connected to the Saudi Telecommunication Department for five years. During this time I realized that there is huge potential in Sri Lanka for this field and I wanted to start a business of my own in Sri Lanka.

When I returned to the country in 2002 and found that I was not familiar with the local situation and joined a private company to get familiarized on the local situation.

In the meantime I formed a partnership company with my wife as a director but I did not invest much on it as I wanted to focus on a MBA program at the Moratuwa University," he said.

When Wasantha felt that the time was right, he invested Rs. 2 million and employed 20 people including two engineers to start a business undertaking turnkey infrastructure projects and maintenance services such as electrical and power generators and telecommunication and construction industries.

It has already completed several data and power upgrading projects of Sri Lanka Telecom under its development of infrastructure such as CDMA, NGN, call centres and Regional Telecom Centres. During 2008-2009 he successfully completed projects worth Rs. 11 million.

The company has expertise in designing, supplying and installation of A 60-2500 three phase panel boards, fibre optic, structured cabling systems, standard grounding systems, lightening protection and surge suppression, fire detection security and small to medium scale civil construction work.

Asked about the difficulties faced at the beginning he said that the financial commitment for these projects was very high and it was a great risk and a good relationship with the client is essential to recover the money on successful completion of the projects. Asked about his future plans he said that there is a huge potential for this industry to grow and he has plans to expand to the North and the East. One major problem is that there is no organization to coordinate access to these places, he said. At present he works with Sri Lanka Telecom and hopes to provide his services to other telecom operators too.

Sri Lanka has a huge potential to develop the BPO industry, one of the highest revenue generators in the world, with its favourable geographic positioning in the world map and the advantage of the low labour cost and the talented work pool available in the country.

"I have done a research on the infrastructure bottlenecks and its impact on the industry growth and also discovered gaps which significantly lead to the slow pace of industry growth of the Sri Lankan BPO sector. I have made proposals to fill these gaps to find a favourable policy framework to accelerate the industry growth", he said.

Technicians at work

Wasantha has proposed to establish BPO zones (outsourcing talent factories) in different parts of the country close to urban or metropolitan centres with adequate amenities including education, housing, shopping and healthcare facilities.

They should be close to an airport, a highway and luxury hotels too, so the zones would be more attractive. He said that instilling an environment of ambience with less congested population and unindustrialized landscaping would bring comparative advantages to the proposed BPO zones.

Wasantha said that it is essential to formulate a policy framework for the BPO industry for its sustainability and discussions should be held by a group of experts from policy makers ,industry experts and consultancy firms with outstanding industry experience. He said that a committee should be set up to evaluate the policy envisaging the future of the industry and its behaviour for a minimum of a twenty years period and the policy must be empowered by an Act of Parliament.

Wasantha strongly believes that the proposed BPO zones could be used as a branding instrument if the country could create them as the world's best outsourcing zone, providing high quality with unbeatable low cost operations. He wishes to get involved in getting this going in the future if he gets the support from the Government and authorities to earn foreign exchange and provide employment for the country.