Create BoP Jobs in India: A Realist Perspective

Parag Gupta
Founder, Waste Ventures

 

 This past week, NPR Planet Money had an exceptional podcast on one of the best ‘job training’ programs in terms of impact for dollar: pre-school.  The short of it was that a lot of the softer skills are learned fairly early on.  I found this amusing as I thought of the broader implications for India – particularly as I used to hit my head against the wall trying to work with Indian CEOs to partner with/ support innovation in early education rather than the popular focus of training workforce just before they start (when it was much too late.)    

As my colleague Linus reported a couple weeks back, we’ve had some trouble recruiting local students for internships.  Not that we have not had any interest.  Quite the contrary, we have had well-qualified Indian students express enthusiasm for internships with Waste Ventures, receive and accept the position, but then suddenly fail to show when it came time to start.  Not once, not twice, but now three times – the last even from London Business School.  Flakiness and lack of punctuality are referred to jokingly as NRI (‘Non-Reliable Indian’) and IST (‘Indian Standard Time’) by locals and Indians abroad as well as the frustrated foreigner but condoned under cultural relativism.  I reject that argument and hold everyone to the same standard.  Such behavior is simply a lack of professionalism (and often softer) skill sets more indicative of the symptoms in the NPR podcast than culture.  After all, the behavior is as endemic in developing countries as it is ‘non-cultural’ to developed countries.    

Extrapolating further in the field, this has tremendous impact on program design at the BoP – particularly as we engage the Base of Pyramid as employees/ owners of the waste picker cooperative.  To grant services to the BoP is easy, to have them purchase something a bit tougher, and hardest when engaging the Base of Pyramid as producers/ employees.  But, this is also where the impact is greatest. 

When we create the cooperative structure with a local NGO, we search for an exceptional local entrepreneur.  Despite popular BoP myth, India does not have entrepreneurs around every corner just yearning for a little capital to start their dairy business or kirana shop.  Though not easy, we can find a local entrepreneur in a second or third tier city.  The majority of our program though is designed for labor with a low skill-level but a hunger to thrive that must be respected rather than romanticized.  The traits we aspire to in our programming include:

  • Segmented and easy-to-learn tasks
  • Clear incentive structure for work well-done consistency and punctuality
  • Interchangeable tasks if necessary in case there is an absence and someone needs to fill in
  • Creation of relationships with supervisors to better track social impacts and career progression

To inculcate the professionalism we aspire to, the onus is on us to create consistent behavior and expectations that set a norm for standard operating procedure from anyone and everyone that works with Waste Ventures – from our local partner all the way to the waste picker that is an owner/operator in the system.

Right now in Osmanabad, we are just stabilizing operations and honing the above practices.  This naturally leads towards measurement to figure out if the operations are having the desired effect.  So far we have conducted a baseline so we may correctly track our impact on Osmanabad and its waste pickers going forward.  More on that in another post! 

Also, if you are a Net Impact member and enjoy discussing the Base of Pyramid, please join a conversation I am hosting on a Net Impact ‘Issue in Depth’ call entitled: Three Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Social Entrepreneurship.  More info can be found at: http://netimpact.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=2632#gupta