When my old friend and host at last week’s wedding, Pramod Bhasin, returned to India from the US, in the early 1990s, it was to open offices for GE Capital, the financial arm of General Electric, then the world’s largest corporation. He didn’t know then that the journey would lead him eventually to confront one of India’s most intractable problems: violence against women.
Within a short time of returning to his native country, Pramod realised that on his doorstep was a seemingly inexhaustible supply of clever and ambitious young Indian accounting and IT graduates. They could, he thought, provide the back-office function for GE – remotely, vastly more efficiently, and at a fraction of the in-house cost in the US.
In 1997 he secured board approval to launch GE Capital International Services (GECIS), the world’s first business process outsourcing (BPO) company. If the basic idea was radical, so was the choice of location: not Delhi or Mumbai, but Gurgaon. This was a mostly undeveloped greenfield site, former farmland, thirty kilometres south of Delhi, where the only other business at the time was the Maruti Suzuki car plant.
Pramod launched GECIS with twenty employees. It grew very rapidly and soon he was hiring several hundred graduates a month. Within four years the workforce had grown to 12,000. But Gurgaon had virtually no infrastructure and expansion came with many unexpected challenges. One of these was the issue of staff safety.
Central to the operation of the business was an entirely new concept – the call centre (yes, blame Pramod). This allowed GE staff in the US to have direct, real-time contact with the people providing the administrative function in India. The majority of the centre staff were women who, given Gurgaon’s distance from Delhi, had to be recruited from the surrounding villages.
Because of the time difference with the US, call centre activity took place largely in the evenings and at night. Somehow the women had to get to and from their workplace, in safety, during the hours of darkness.
Pramod was lucky to find a local driver with a couple of minibuses, whom he trusted. As demand increased, their relationship developed and Pramod helped him build his business. Today it’s a bespoke chauffeuring fleet servicing many of India’s biggest companies, and one of many spin-off successes flowing from Pramod’s choice of location.
A much bigger one has been the growth of Gurgaon itself, as a stream of domestic and international companies followed GECIS to locate there. Now Gurgaon boasts nearly a million inhabitants and has the third highest per capita income of any Indian city. It is home to Coca-Cola, Pepsi, BMW, Hyundai and Nissan, as well as all of India’s major airlines.
By 2005 Pramod had realised that there were was huge potential for business beyond GE. He undertook a management buyout, renamed the company Genpact, and took its services into the open market. That year it generated nearly $500 million in revenue. Two years later it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and the following year, 2008, turned over more than $1 billion for the first time.
Pramod stepped down as CEO in 2011 and over the last fifteen years has devoted his time increasingly to philanthropic projects. An early attempt to provide skills training in rural areas foundered as it became apparent that there were insurmountable obstacles, social and economic, between the training of villagers in the necessary skills and the actuality of getting them into the labour market.
Nevertheless, it left him with invaluable experience of the ‘real’ rather than the corporate India and prepared him, in an echo of that early challenge in Gurgaon, to turn once more to the issue of women’s safety.
Gender-based violence is a very real and endemic problem in India. A number of horrific incidents have made international headlines in recent years, while a 2025 survey reports that sixty-six percent of women in Delhi experienced some form of harassment in public spaces during that year.
Now, with the active encouragement of his partner, Malavika, and daughter, Sonali, Pramod has founded an NGO called Aparajita. Its aim – as ambitious as it is simple – is to make India safer for women and girls.
He has teamed up with Abhijit Bannerjee, Nobel Prize-winning economist, author of Poor Economics, and co-founder of the Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Together they hope to gather the numbers – the hard data – that will lead them to a better understanding of the root causes of the problem, to get an accurate measure of its scale, and to start modelling potential solutions.
Pramod is now in his early seventies. This is where he wants to put his money and energy over the next decade or so. He is a modest person who tends to make light of his achievements. I usually find out about them in moments of casual conversation. Today I was telling a writer friend about his latest venture. ‘It must make you very proud of your friend,’ she said. It does.
A Few Kind Words 