Choudhary’s work fascinated me because it goes to the heart of the country’s democratic debate—what kind of democracy do we really want to be? It goes back to that fundamental question we addressed in the introduction to this book—what kind of democracy does India really need? Measured or experience? Choudhary’s bet, like mine, is that India now needs to metamorphose into an experienced democracy. At the heart of his project lies this dream—making democracy an everyday experience of complaint, feedback, redress, and conversation. When I spoke to Choudhary, I realized we both believed that the act of conversation lies at the heart of democracy—and that is what makes his project critical. It allows daily conversation. How did the technology part come to the organization? It came via Bill Thies, a software expert who works at Microsoft’s India office in Bangalore and happened to meet Choudhary. Thies, a PhD student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) joined hands with Choudhary to create a platform that could be used to connect disparate voices from the tribal belt. “We were clear on what we wanted—we wanted a simple system that anyone can use, which does not require a lot of education or literacy skills to use. And we wanted a system that could absorb and disseminate information effortlessly and that’s what we built,” says Choudhary.
What they thought of was this—how can a system be built where tribals could talk about all the things most important to them? Where can they talk to each other about their cow, their chili, their rice? “We began by being Google for the poor—as in people came to us mainly to listen and get information. Now we are transforming also into the Facebook for the poor via voice,” says Choudhary, whose project had earlier won a UN Democracy Fund award.
Present radio laws in India do not allow CGnet Swara to be on the medium that is their natural ground. Commercial radio licenses are too expensive and community radio has too short a radius—often barely ten kilometers (about 6.2 miles). “For this 10 km license, you need to take 22 permissions. It is bizarre,” says Choudhary. Without a license, there is a citizen band at 26.9 MHz to 27.2 MHz that the law allows people to use, but the receiver is still way too expensive for tribal areas. The cheapest receiver that can catch this band costs about Rs 5,000. Efforts are underway to make different kinds of models to make low-cost servers, including using the Raspberry Pi, the pirate radio transmitter. The dream is to run localized radio stations that would have infinite depth in local information using an army of citizen journalists, most of them trained by Choudhary.
Until then, CGnet Swara is experimenting with various formats—like the song programming they did in 2013 called Sangeet Swara where anyone could dial in and sing a song and anyone could listen to it. Nearly 100,000 people tuned in.
But for all the attention, Choudhary is often on the radar of government agencies, which have frequently searched his premises, suspecting Maoist misuse of his network. It doesn’t help that Lingaram Kodopi, the activist nephew of Soni Sori—who was accused of being a Maoist rebel and tortured in Chhattisgarh (activists have called it a gross violation of human rights)—was trained in citizen journalism by Choudhary. As Sori’s case led to global headlines as an example of human rights violations in the fight against Maoists, Kodopi too attracted a lot of scrutiny with his activities, many of which, as a citizen journalist, led back to Choudhary. Kodopi is the first trained tribal journalist from the region.
“Sometimes the government suspects us, sometimes the Maoists do—but neither has ever found anything amiss with us. We genuinely want to be the independent media bridge—otherwise this war will never stop. We will never stop until forced to stop.”
Until then, there are some interesting business plans. For instance, Swasthya Swara, a voice-based platform where anyone can discuss herbal medicines or cures and anyone can listen in and access the medication. “We can even stock such pure organic medicines and supply them to anyone who wants them. It will be a completely novel model.”
THAT’S THE SORT OF OUT-OF-THE-BOX THINKING THAT BROUGHT ABOUT DesiCrew, which was India’s pioneering rural BPO when it started in 2005 and the first one begun from scratch as a start-up by a woman entrepreneur.
Saloni Malhotra, a 23-year-old engineer, heard a lecture in Delhi, given by Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala of the department of electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in the southern Indian city of Chennai, that spoke about taking technology to the masses. And so she did. In 2005, she started DesiCrew in Chennai, incubated under the entrepreneurship program at IIT-Madras, which was run by Jhunjhunwala; she built a company of 600 employees across two Indian states with angel funding from a top-ranking former executive of Infosys, one of India’s best-known information technology firms.
DesiCrew started operations as a commercial organization in 2007, offering services in project and content management, digitization, mail-room services, secondary research and transcription, website monitoring, localization of web products and beta testing.
While current venture capital funding does not allow the company to reveal exact numbers, DesiCrew has grown by 50 percent in the past year alone. The idea was to see if the kind of outsourcing work that kick-started an Infosys could be done away from the major cities of India, taking that kind of work to the villages and providing employment there.
“We always said let us take jobs to where people are rather than bring people to jobs. We only wanted to create opportunities for the folks who want a white collar job in their geographies. Why can we not provide the kind of training for basic backend work like data entry, for instance at a small town or village level?” says Malhotra, who opened one center in the village of Kollumagudi, about a six-hour drive from Chennai. The beautiful colonial-style bungalow cost DesiCrew a fraction of what the company would have paid as rent in any city. The company also discovered that while the crop of local employees that they could hire often lacked the external finesse and soft skills that a city hire might have, in the long run the rural employees often turned out to be more stable and loyal.
One of the strategies that the company applied was to first start BPO voice operations in regional languages before diversifying into English. The current CEO, J. K. Manivannan, says his pitch is always that DesiCrew is the place where students from a rural background get a chance to pick up invaluable soft skills.
“There have been many instances where people have spent a couple of years with us and have then moved on to larger BPOs in cities but equally there have been instances when the candidate has tried to make the leap too swiftly and having failed to adjust in a larger pond has come back to us,” says Manivannan. He says one of the biggest drives for new employees is to soak up the English language. “In fact, we did not venture into voice mainly because we wanted processes that can be replicated for an international market. For example, a policy issuance for a domestic insurance company can be replicated for an international health-care/insurance company. The focus on English is because in addition to the linguistic skill, in Indian context, more accentuated in the rural areas—knowing English is also a proxy for confidence, self-belief, and worldly exposure. A rural BPO needs to be seen in the context of reinvention of the public skills of the employee.” In fact even the term “rural BPO” is hardly ever used these days. To emphasize that the quality provided is on a par with any urban center, the term used is “Impact Sourcing Service Provider.”
Veena Shetty is the head of human resources for DesiCrew. She worked at India’s biggest bank, the State Bank of India, and at tech and consulting companies like Cisco and Accenture, until choosing to return to a town near Kaup, a village in Karnataka where DesiCrew has another center and where her husband had business.
“It is a delicate balance. On one hand, our aim is to ensure that new employees from a rural background do not get intimidated and absorb at their own pace so that their growth is maximized, but on the other hand, the client is not less demanding of us because we work as a rural BPO,” says Shetty. What this means logistically is that DesiCrew had to ge
t government broadband connectivity to Kollumagudi when it started operations there. But it wasn’t good enough. DesiCrew now spends Rs 50 lakh ($84,000) in running two separate lines in every center so that there is never a “no connectivity” moment for the client.
When she started building the company, Malhotra, now only 32, traveled across the state of Tamil Nadu (whose capital is Chennai) in buses from village to village trying to grasp what she was getting into. “I ought to have been very scared. I was a young girl, all alone in very remote locations,” remembers Malhotra. “But I was not scared. There was a sense of comfort that I felt in those communities which I had never felt in a city. What people there did not have is as much exposure that city folk take for granted.
“We wanted to understand whether given exposure, the model would be competitive—and it is.”
Ashwanth Gnanavelu, a founding member of Malhotra’s team who has the background of having worked with P&G in Surrey, says the DesiCrew model is to bridge two very disparate worlds. “We have tried understanding that people feel happiest when they get employment at a location that does not uproot them from their social context. This is especially true in India when already such a churn is happening with dealing with modernity in every aspect of life. In such a situation, when a person from a village is able to access the modernity of a BPO job without having to entirely displace themselves from their social context, it is a boon.”
In 2012, DesiCrew raised $1.12 million in a second round of funding from responsAbility Ventures I and VenturEast Tenet Fund II.
For Malhotra, Manivannan and their team, what is more important is that in a place like Kaup, where most of their employees had earnings of barely $50 a month, they have been able to double it to more than $100 a month. This means around 80 percent of their employees at this center—and the story is replicated in almost every other center—started saving for the first time after getting a BPO job in their village.
CHAPTER 10
FROM DUNG TO DETERGENT
It happens barely 60 kilometers (37 miles) away from the Indian capital, a medieval practice of discrimination so disgusting that Indian governments and courts have passed law after law trying to ban it. Yet it lives on, barely a two-hour drive from Delhi.
Manual scavenging, one of the worst and most heinous aspects of India’s caste system, is practiced, I found out to my horror, barely a few minutes from the new townships coming up in the Ghaziabad area on the outskirts of Delhi. When the outlines of the new towers, full of advertisements of elevators and swimming pools, gymnasiums and crèches (day care centers) end, the road meanders through fields to land in the village of Nekpur in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh.
Manual scavenging is the name given to the task of picking up someone else’s human feces with bare hands, placing them on a wicker basket and carrying them to a distant location, often digging a hole, and burying them. This was a task performed by the lowest of lower castes in ancient and medieval India, the untouchables. In the absence of a proper sewage system and compost toilets, this was the Hindu solution. The truly foul thing is that this is a hereditary profession, passed on from generation to generation, keeping millions trapped over centuries. In orthodox communities, there is no escape for the manual scavenger because they would never be allowed into another occupation after performing this task. It’s the worst kind of catch-22. The life of the manual scavenger also meant the lowest of low lives—no entry to the home of anyone from any other caste, no touching anyone who is not from the scavenger tribe—virtually no interaction with anyone who is not a scavenger.
As India’s cities and towns overflow, and solid waste management systems crumble in most places (as we said in chapter 6, 80 percent of India’s sewage goes untreated),1 manual scavengers have also been forced to enter drains and clean them. Often desperate scavengers get heavily drunk before entering a drain so that they can ignore the stench. Another hidden truth is that one of the biggest employers of manual scavengers in India is the railways—which employ more people than any other single institution in the world, but have failed to make compost toilets mandatory in trains. The continuance of colonial-style open toilets means that the railways continue to informally hire hundreds of manual scavengers every day. Government bodies like the railways can get away with this because most manual scavengers are on informal contracts with no regularized documentation showing the nature of their work.
In her searing book Unseen: The Truth about India’s Manual Scavengers, Bhasha Singh2 traveled through 11 states meeting manual scavengers, and she discovered that, in a ghastly practice, the job has no breaks or holidays. The work is done every single day, come rain or sun, with no exceptions for illness or even pregnancy. Singh met people who told her that the community encourages people to start young so that they get accustomed to the job quickly—so there is no minimum age either. In fact, Singh met was a young man of 23 who had been working as a manual scavenger for 15 years.
She also points out that the Indian government sanctioned Rs 100 crores for the rehabilitation of manual scavengers in the budgets of 2011–2012 and 2012–2013 and each time the entire amount went unspent. The ironic reason presented from the government side was that no one who is a manual scavenger was approaching the government to take the monetary support—and by the time the year ended, the government declared each time that there had been no comprehensive study to show how many were actually working as manual scavengers. One of the reasons was perhaps that the government kept insisting before the new 2013 law was passed that there was no or virtually no manual scavenging left in India. To counter this, the not-for-profit Safai Karmachari Andolan presented a document of 15,000 images with names and locations of manual scavengers at work.
That this practice continues in modern India—estimates suggest about three-quarters of a million scavengers in the country at present—is one of the biggest embarrassments for the country.
The law banning manual scavenging, called the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Bill, was passed in 2013, making it strictly illegal to hire manual scavengers, calling for the destruction of all dry toilets and providing for the rehabilitation of people employed as manual scavengers.
On paper, it had been banned since 1993, but not a single person had been charged with the practice in 20 years—hence the need for the new law. According to the 2011 census, there are over 750,000 families that still practice manual scavenging.
But change is coming to the village of Nekpur. A project developed by the Safai Karmachari Andolan and the Delhi-based high-profile economics and commerce college, the Shri Ram College of Commerce, identified 20 women from the village of Nekpur who had been working as manual scavengers. None of them had any access to education, health care or sanitation, nor did they have any real earnings. Project Azmat—an Urdu word for dignity—is the story of how these 20 women became entrepreneurs making detergent that is now sold across the city of Delhi.
The business model has four steps:
Replacing dry latrines with two pit toilets
Providing professional training in the production of the chosen product
Forming a cooperative society
Establishing a successful microenterprise through regular production and sale.
“What we wanted to achieve is not just taking the people away from a terrible way of life but also to give an alternative,” Shriyani Sharma, the second-year commerce student who manages the project, told me. “You can give money but just giving money is not enough. If you just give money, it is not a sustainable model. The money will be quickly spent, then what?
“This project answers that ‘then what’ question. The idea is for us to create a livelihood that keeps them away from scavenging forever.”
The women have been taught to make detergent with the help of an industry body, the PHD Rural Development Foundation, and a chemical maker, Chemisynth group. A women’s cooperative was created as the foundation that would create a p
roduct that could bring a livelihood to these women. A name was created—Neki, the Hindi word for decency, goodness, goodwill, which even has a popular phrase of its own: “‘Neki aur puch, puch,’” meaning why ask so many times before doing something good.
Together the women and the students came up with a formula for a detergent. It is now sold in two varieties—Neki Supreme, which sells at the higher end at around Rs 70 per kilogram (2.2 pounds), and Neki Active, which sells at around Rs 50 for one kilogram. At both ends, Neki is as expensive as some of the most popular brands in the market, including Tide and Surf.
Initial testing of the product was done in several venues including the commercial washing areas or dhobi ghats, wholesale and retail outlets, department stores, hostels and residential areas in and around Ghaziabad.
The project in its first year sold about 2,000 kilograms (4,409 pounds) of detergent from 15 selling points in and around Delhi. The profit margin for Neki Active is around Rs 13 per kilogram and for Supreme around Rs 27 per kilogram.
The place where the detergent is made is a clean, single-storied house that has a large lawn, two rooms and a wide verandah. The women work on the concrete lawn or the verandah to mix chemicals for the detergent. They come in around 9:30 every morning and start the day with morning prayers—long kept away from temples of every kind, this is almost a re-induction of these women into normal society.
Rajni Walia, 25, told me that the biggest change that had come into her life in the past year has been that people have started inviting her into their homes in the village. “I thought maybe even after I stop doing the dirty work, no one will want to touch me. But it is not like that. People now know that I work with soap. So everyone thinks I am clean,” she said.
The women were earning an average of Rs 300 per month in their earlier occupation—this has gone up to an average of Rs 2,000. “The purchasing power itself has made a world of difference to their confidence,” says Sharma. “Now they no longer go to ask a shopkeeper to take pity and give them something. They bring hard cash.”
Recasting India Page 18
