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In spite of the global economic crisis, India's exports from the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector are expected to have grown to $17.8 billion in the past year, according to the country's Parliament on Tuesday.

Traditionally, Indian BPO companies are of two types - voice processing and data processing. Pure play call centers were popular in the early days of the industry, but as years went by data processing became more attractive since it meant deeper intricacies into the business of customers. The margins in data processing are much higher than those in voice, up to 20 percent.

"Exports from the BPO sector in India have grown from $12.4 billion in fiscal year 2010 to $17.8 billion expected in 2013 despite the global economic crisis," Minister of State for Communications and IT Milind Deora said.

Some businesses, however, are reluctant to associate with the term BPO and want to be known as technology or “experience” companies. While Indian BPOs provide a wide spectrum of process management services, market estimates suggest that in the last few years the larger BPO firms did not have more than 20 percent of their revenue come from voice services, leading many BPO companies to also work as consultants.

The market share of the Indian BPO sector in the global BPO industry has increased from 34 percent to 37 percent over the past three years, and the global sourcing market has grown from $36 billion to $50 billion in the same amount of time. An estimated 917,000 citizens were employed in the BPO sector last year.

The Indian government has extended several incentives to increase IT-ITES/BPO export revenue by making various tax benefits available to qualified BPO units. The benefits include customs duty exemption on imported goods, reimbursement of central sales tax and excise duty exemptions on procurement of indigenously manufactured goods.

A conductive ecosystem is also helping Indian companies expand into Latin America in order to better serve the U.S. market. Infosys (News - Alert), India's second largest IT services exporter, recently announced the opening of a BPO center in Costa Rica.

The move toward the Latin America market allows India to fulfill the increasing demand from U.S. customers who want their IT service providers to have support centers in the same time zone as themselves.