The archbishop of Bangalore does not think the city’s legions of call centre workers are going straight to hell.

But he, like many in conservative India, is worried that the young men and women working the phones at night may be engaging in unsaintly bouts of sex and drug-taking. While Westerners may vilify India’s call centre workers for stealing their jobs, conservatives at home worry the young employees - who mostly work overnight and earn far more than earlier generations - are helping themselves to an alien set of Western values.

“Many have told me they have spiritual problems,” said Bernard Moras, the most senior Catholic in a city of more than half a million Christians. “Girls will come to me saying, ‘I have been friends with a boy, I have misbehaved, I feel perturbed in heart and mind’,” he delicately added, according to a report published in Australia.

The Indian media has helped fuel the call centres’ “Sodom and Gomorrah” reputation with stories of used condoms blocking call centre toilet drains and drug taking during night-shifts.

It suggests this behaviour is the inevitable consequence of young people working the night-shift to deal with customers in the West, even if it’s to discuss staid topics such as the customer’s mortgage repayment or why the printer won’t print. Call centres have been a powerful catalyst for a blossoming youth culture in India by giving large numbers of young Indians the financial means to live away from the disapproving glares of their elders and to enjoy cafes, malls and bars that did not exist a generation ago. Their paypackets of up to 20,000 rupees (C$511) a month are 10 times higher than the national average monthly salary.

“Call centres are now seen as red-light districts,” said anthropologist Shiv Visvanathan. “Even the name ‘call centre’ evokes call girls”.

But despite their increasing independence, call centre workers say media reports of the death of Indian conservative values in Bangalore may have been greatly exaggerated. An almost impenetrable barricade of parked motorbikes blocks the entrance to Purple Haze, one of the many Bangalore bars brimming at the weekend with outsourcing and IT industry workers. Inside young men in grungy clothes headbang to hard rock.

Vicky, whooping along to music videos blaring overhead, is one of an estimated 415,000 people working in call centres outsourced to India from the West to deal with mundane issues such as utility payments and credit card bills.