BANGALORE: A website that attracts over three lakh serious visitors each month deserves more attention that it gets now. Its Indian counterpart is already on cyberspace but gets only a few hundred hits a month.

The site, WageIndicator.com, based in the Netherlands, was launched in 2001 in an effort to bring about transparency in salary structures across similar sectors in the European Union.

Its extension to India, according to its director Paulien Osse, who was in Bangalore recently, was deliberate. "Wage structures, especially in the information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services (ITES) sectors in India, do have a bearing on similar jobs in distant countries such as Latin America as well as other Asian countries catching up with the BPO boom and offshoring of manufacturing activity," she said.

The original website and its counterpart here will have a facility called "Salary Check" which will provide information about comparative salaries for similar work in a number of countries. Apart from the cold data, there are indicators of the relative purchasing powers of say ten euros or five hundred rupees. This means a call centre executive here with two years of experience knows exactly how he or she stands in comparison with his or her counterpart in another country.

WageIndicator datasets are also available for research by third parties, subject to protection of confidentiality and privacy.

The website works on the basis of data gathered through extensive, voluntary disclosures in an online questionnaire.

The target respondents are both employees and job seekers.

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