Delta Air Lines, the world's largest commercial carrier after its merger with Northwest Airlines in 2008, said that it is pulling back 2,000 jobs from its India-based call centers that handle sales and reservations, claiming customer dissatisfaction, after six years of having outsourced the call services.

Plunging sales after the 11 September terrorist attacks in the US, led Delta and United Airlines, among others, to outsource some reservation calls to India with Delta contracting the sales and reservations operations to India's third-largest IT firm, Wipro Infotech, in 2002, saying that the move would save the company about $25 million a year.

Citing mounting customer complaints over difficulty in communicating with Indian call centre employees, the Atlanta-based airline says it stopped routing calls to the Wipro call centre in Bangalore from the beginning of this year though it had not stopped the airlines' correspondence operations being carried out by Wipro.

Delta chief executive Richard Anderson said in a recorded message to employees that it moved all calls out of India in the first quarter of this year as, ''Customer acceptance of call centre representatives in other countries was low, and our customers are not shy about letting us have that feedback.''

The company says it would still keep its call centres in Jamaica and South Africa operational since there were not many complaints against them, but added that it would prune staff  in the two countries in the coming months.

Delta had outsourced over 6,000 call centre jobs to India, South Africa and Jamaica in 2002 with more than half of being handled by wipro. Although Delta had closed three call centres in India in 2004 when it ran into financial problems, Wipro still managed to rake in an estimated $15-$30 million a year through this contract with Delta.

Delta did not say how many people it has added in the US to handle the call-centre work after terminating the outsourcing operations in India, to the around 4,500 people that it currently employs in its call centres in the US, including over 1,000 in Atlanta - its largest call centre in the world - and Augusta.

With the US in recession, the travel industry business has slumped and Delta had cut about 6,000 jobs last year, warning that it would have to prune more jobs should the economy worsen.

During his election campaign, US President Barack Obama had vowed to bring outsourcing jobs back to the US and has made bringing jobs back to the US a precondition to financial support for US businesses. Delta termination of Wipro's outsourcing contract comes after United Airlines pulled 165 call-centre jobs back to the US from India in February, while retaining some reservation calls still being forwarded to the country.

United Airlines has its call centre operations in Chicago, Detroit and Hawaii.

Last month, Chrysler said it would move its customer-service centre back from India to the US while last week, SLM Corporation's student lender Sallie Mae said it would bring back to the US about 2,000 jobs that it had outsourced to Bangalore and Pune in India, the Philippines and Mexico.

In a cost-cutting move Sallie Mae had recently axed 4,000 jobs out of 12,000 and had outsourced call-center and information-technology jobs overseas.

Senators at Capitol Hill expressed happiness when Sallie Mae said that it would not mind the extra $35 million a year burden in higher wages to bring the jobs back to the US, with a spokesperson for the lender saying that the move was a patriotic act and it was very difficult when the company had to move the jobs overseas but the decision to bring the jobs back was very easy.

JPMorgan, which has two call centers in the US and two in India to handle the debit-like cards for food stamp users in Florida, said it would stop routing the calls to India and bring the jobs back to Florida.

Since Florida has contracted the electronic benefit transfer (EBT) programme to JP Morgan, lawmakers in Florida were appalled when they learnt that JPMorgan had outsourced this job to call centres in India.

With the global economy in turmoil, the Indian outsourcing industry is now facing the backlash from rising protectionism that the US has been adopting. Since the US accounts for over 60 per cent of Indian outsourcing revenue, the industry's growth has been stagnating since the recession began to take its toll in most countries.