Our city has been crowned by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for the Centre for Excellence (CFE). Kolkata triumphed to glory trumping Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune in the race.

Kolkata bags PwC's Centre for Excellence

After New York, Kolkata gets the privilege of this kind of set up by PwC, the global consultancy giant. A soft launch had already been done two months back and the result has been satisfactory. CFE Kolkata has already performed some work in SMAC (social mobile analytic cloud). New York CFE, continuing its two and half year journey, performs high-end IT jobs, including cloud storage, analytics, mobility and social media.

According to executive director and partner Debdas Sen of PwC India, Kolkata got the edge because of the highly skilled talent pool it provides. Employee strength at Kolkata CFE is 62 at present, a little less than New York where it is around 100. They will be carrying out high end jobs for the Asian companies and governments while the New York counterpart will cater to the rest of the world. Kolkata CFE is already working with 40 clients that include Government of India, German chemical giant BASF, ITC, Adobe and others multinationals.

Kolkata records surge in job growth: ASSOCHAM Report

This development comes in the backdrop of a recent report by ASSOCHAM which showed that the new job generation in Kolkata has surged by over 19 per cent during the first quarter of the ongoing financial year 2013-14 as against the corresponding period last year.

"Even Kolkata's share in total number of new jobs generated across India has increased marginally from over four per cent a year ago to over five per cent, while Delhi-NCR (national capital region) has remained numero uno in new job generation with maximum share of over 27 per cent compared to other cities across India," according to a sector-specific analysis titled 'Job Trends Across Cities & Sectors,' conducted by The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM).

A total of over 6,500 new jobs were generated in Kolkata during the first quarter of the current financial year as against about 5.500 jobs in the Q1 of the last financial year, highlighted the ASSOCHAM analysis. The information technology (IT), information technology enabled services (ITeS) and hardware together account for maximum share of over 38 per cent in the new jobs generated across Kolkata followed by banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector (10 per cent share) and academics (seven per cent share), telecom and other manufacturing (six per cent share of each).

While the sectors like construction and engineering, real estate, automobile, retail, infrastructure, human resources (HR), fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) have lost their sheen with insignificant share in the new jobs generated across the city of joy aka Kolkata.

The ASSOCHAM team tracked the data on a daily basis for vacancies posted by over 3,000 companies on various job portals, advertisements in job supplements of national and regional dailies and news journals for 56 cities and 32 sectors offering employment opportunities across India. Clearly, Kolkata is experiencing winds of change and things are looking up in the city, which was once ‘popular’ for its non-existent work culture.