I made a short visit to Kolkata (Calcutta) in India last week. UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) had arranged a mission to West Bengal to examine how more links could be established between that area of India and the UK. I was speaking at a conference for a group of local Indian technology firms.

I had prepared a talk the day before leaving and then polished it off waiting in the bar at Heathrow airport. Things like a limited battery life can really create a strong incentive to get things finished. I arrived at the hotel where I was staying – and where the talk was due to take place – with very little time to spare. I basically arrived in India on Thursday, got a shower, had a shirt pressed, and then went downstairs to do the talk. Talk about hectic.

On the agenda it said I had 45 minutes. Just before I was going to start they said to me I should aim for 1hr 15 minutes instead, as the agenda had changed! Fortunately the extra time made it possible to turn the presentation into more of a dialogue with the audience. I asked them to interrupt and throw comments into the talk so we could bounce ideas around, rather than waiting for a Q&A session at the end.

My session went on for about 90 minutes and it was great. I was talking about some of the present issues in outsourcing generally and then more specifically how Kolkata could/should promote itself. The audience was full of comment and we had a great debate.

In the afternoon, a number of local companies were presenting to each other with me there as well to offer some tips on what UK service buyers might think of their pitch.

On Friday I went around Kolkata in a car in blazing heat – and with failing air conditioning. Each office we called at offered some respite from the heat and the traffic noise. I visited some of the major companies that have invested in the area such as HSBC, Cognizant, Capgemini, and IBM.

It was interesting to see the facilities these major firms had created in Kolkata. Each of them has recruited thousands of people locally and they kept on repeating some of the same reasons for investing in this part of India – primarily attrition is much lower here, there is a stronger sense of loyalty to the company and people don’t job hop as easily as in some other locations. It’s also slightly cheaper than locations such as Gurgaon or Bangalore. However I don’t think the difference in cost outweighs the far greater benefit of being able to reduce the staff churn to someone more manageable.

I actually found some of the local home grown companies more interesting, perhaps because there were some stories and studies that I enjoyed hearing, from companies I have never heard of. Rebaca are working on better ways of pushing video around the Internet and creating streaming technologies that blend all sorts of existing technologies – I imagined it as something like a cross between Sky+, Joost, and Slingbox.

Brick and Click also impressed me with a number of product ideas, including a complete pharmacy management system that handles the entire prescription and dispensing process for pharmacy retailers. The NHS should really talk to these guys, given some of their difficulties in this area. The Brick and Click system has already been rolled out to a number of US states.

And let’s not forget the humble contact centre. The COO of BNKe Solutions, Suresh Menon, was so keen to meet me he dragged himself into the office after major spine surgery. It was literally his first trip outside since the surgery and then the people from the West Bengal government who were arranging all my appointments hustled me in and out in something like 15 minutes, because we were running hopelessly late on the schedule! Suresh explained how his major advantage in the market was that he has an attrition rate of below 5 per cent. It’s an incredibly low figure for a contact centre and does demonstrate that there are differences between different regions of India. That sort of figure would be almost impossible in Bangalore.

I hope to get back to Kolkata soon. Not just because I want to explore some more of the historic sites associated with Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, but there is a lot taking place in India beyond the well-established metropolitan areas we are all familiar with. I’d like to see how fast this ancient city could develop a hi-tech future.