London: Four American states are considering legislation to ban outsourcing of state data processing contracts to developing nations even as dozens of household names, spanning insurance, banking, technology and telecom, are transferring part of their white collar administrative and customer-service work to Asia, particularly to India to cut costs.

The US states considering the measure to curb flight of jobs are New Jersey, Maryland, Connecticut and Washington, 'The Sunday Telegraph' reported on May 25.

The report also expressed concern about the future of UK call centres, a major industry employing about 5,00,000 people across 6,000 sites.

According to it, Mitial Research, a specialist consultancy, has predicted that one third of Britain's larger call centres could shut down by 2005 with the loss of 90,000 jobs.

General Electric, the giant US conglomerate, which initiated the bold decision to shift thousands of back office jobs to India a decade ago is still in the van, with 11,000 Indian processing staff, the report said.

"If China is becoming the workshop of the world, India is the world's back office," says Chris Gentle, a director at Deloitte Consulting, part of Deloitte and Touche, the big five accountancy firm.

Deloitte estimates that 2 million jobs in financial services alone are likely to move from developed economies to emerging nations in the next five years. Across all industries, the exodus of services jobs could be 4 million.

PTI