HUMAN BEINGS ARE INDIA’S ASSETS
India’s greatest need for sustaining economic growth and maintaining social harmony is generation of decent employment. Numbers of castes and communities demanding reservations of jobs are increasing. Reservation for an economically weaker class, cutting across divisions of caste and religion, has also been accepted. States, even richer ones like Haryana, now want private sector jobs reserved for their local people.
Rampal is employed as a horticulture worker in the grounds of my upscale apartment complex in Haryana. I met him one morning on my walk in the manicured park within our gated complex. He was wearing a smart uniform, a helmet, and safety boots. He was neatly trimming bushes and trees. He cut me a dried bamboo walking stick from the green bamboo grove he was tending that morning.
I asked him how long he had worked in our complex and where he had worked before. Rampal had migrated from Madhya Pradesh eighteen years ago to Punjab where he worked in the garment industry stitching clothes. He came to Gurgaon a year ago because the work in Punjab was not secure. He had been earning about Rs 17000 a month in Punjab and was now being paid Rs. 10000 in the park. Then why did he move, I asked? He said working conditions were better here and he was treated with greater respect. He worked only eight hours a day, six days a week. He could earn an additional Rs. 10000 a month by walking dogs of apartment owners, who paid Rs 5000 per dog for an hour’s work— half an hour in mornings and evenings. He also had more time with his family than he had before—he has three small children. He would like to earn more he said because costs were rising, and it was difficult to make ends meet.
Rampal has worked in three industries—manufacturing, farming (gardening), and servicing (dog-walking). I asked him how he had learned his new skills. I was especially curious about how he had learned to keep his dogs in order because my niece, who employs a dog walker, said her dog is undisciplined in the house but very well-behaved with his dog walker who, she said, has “a way with dogs”. What was Rampal’s way I asked him? Looking at my stick, he said, dogs do not learn discipline with a stick. They learn with kindness. Then he philosophically asked, if that is how animals learn, what about us human beings?
Gurgaon is booming, with growth of modern manufacturing and service industries, and attractive apartment complexes and shopping malls for upper class people. Gurgaon generates a variety of incomes and employment—for wealthy investors in venture capital and property firms and managers in MNCs, and for domestic workers, delivery workers, security guards, and estate workers (like Rampal) who service their needs.
Recently, delivery workers of an online grocery service in Gurgaon went on strike to demand that their pay not be reduced! They could hardly make ends meet with the Rs 10000 or less they were earning, and that too in working conditions that were becoming harsher and less safe with demands on them to reduce delivery times. The strike fizzled out; the workers accepted less wages because “what else is there” they asked?
We have been aware for at least fifteen years, during UPA and NDA regimes, that India must change the pattern of its economic growth, not just increase the sizeof its economy. Otherwise, the country will not be able to sustain growth or maintain social harmony. The policy responses so far have been the “ostrich” strategy. Bury your head in statistics to prove there is no problem; and hope that, given more time, the problem will go away when increasing wealth at the top trickles down to incomes and social security on the ground. Meanwhile, make it easier for employers to exploit workers, to motivate them to employ more workers. Also, prevent workers from forming unions to have their human needs heard—for dignity, safety, reasonable working hours, and adequate wages and social security to take care of their families.
Skill development has become organized as an industry to meet lofty targets for skilling hundreds of millions, churning out large numbers of workers with standard sets of skills to fit what employers project they will need for industrial establishments in manufacturing, and in industry-like establishments in the organized service sector. The skilling industry is expected to produce little cogs that fit neatly into a large industrial machine. In this paradigm, humans are chewed up in the machine with work squeezed out of them, and discarded when the machine has no further use for them.
The relationships between humans, work, and the economy must change for India to upskill its large potential workforce amidst radical changes in technologies and shapes of industries around the world. India needs workers who can learn faster. Human beings are the only “appreciating assets” an enterprise has. Humans can learn new skills and appreciate their own value if they are motivated to. Machines cannot. Technologists counter that artificial intelligence (AI) machines will soon learn how humans learn and artificial intelligence will equal human intelligence. Seems odd that a human rich and capital poor country should want to displace intelligent humans (whose intelligence is suppressed within industrial establishments) with intelligent machines.
It is not India’s labor laws that need changing. Nor the culture of Indian workers, who can be the best in the world, as they prove to be when they work in other countries. What must change is the culture of employers in India. Employers in large establishments, employers in small establishments, even employers of domestic workers. Workers are human beings. They want dignity, kindness, and opportunities to learn. Even dogs do, Rampal said. Treat your workers well, look out for their social security, pay them well, and they will be loyal to your enterprise and learn and change along with you.
(Published in Tribune, May 6 2023)
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/lets-learn-to-appreciate-human-resources-505143