India will soon have a database of software and IT professionals, including those working in call centres and business process outsourcing (BPO) companies.

The National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom), the premier body of the industry, has roped in National Security Depository Ltd (NSDL) to compile the database of employees of IT firms across the country.

"We recently engaged NSDL as a third party vendor to build a database of about a million tech workers in software firms and IT-enabled services, including call centres and BPO companies," Nasscom president Kiran Karnik said here Thursday.

The database will have the background of employees, their academic qualifications, experience, domain expertise, career switch and personal identification in the form of biometrics.

"The data will enable industry members and allied agencies to cross-check and verify credentials and antecedents of all techies," Karnik said on the sidelines of an IT quality summit.

Though the data will be in NSDL's custody, it will be owned by each employee and accessible to companies or allied agencies only when authorised by the employee. It will be for each employee to decide in his or her interest.

If an employee wants to change jobs, prospective employers will be able do a quick check of his data with NSDL.

"We have already initiated the process and NSDL will roll out a pilot project in the next two to three months. We are defining modalities to collect the data either company-wise or region-wise," Karnik said.

"The pilot project will be undertaken in multiple cities and it will be expanded to cover the entire country in the next 12-18 months."

Currently, in the absence of collective data on a single platform, keeping track of employees, their background and domain skills for prospective employers or related agencies has been a time-consuming exercise for stakeholders, stretching their resources.

The proposed database will address industry-specific human resource problems. In the wake of recent alleged frauds in the BPO and ITES sectors, including call centres, NSDL will first compile data on employees in these sectors and subsequently take up that of software professionals.

In this context, Karnik said the industry expert committee has made recommendations to the government for amending the IT Act of 1999 for greater data protection, cyber privacy and security environment.

"The recommendations have been made in consultation with the IT, home and law ministries. The amendments are expected to be made in the next six months," he said.

"We hope the bill will be introduced in parliament in the next session and passed hopefully by the end of the current fiscal."