Let’s learn to appreciate human resources

Arun Maira

Former Member, Planning Commission

INDIA’S greatest need for sustaining economic growth and maintaining social harmony is the generation of decent employment. The number of castes and communities demanding reservation of jobs is increasing. Reservation for an economically weaker class, cutting across divisions of caste and religion, has also been accepted. States, even richer ones like Haryana, 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. 

I asked him how long he had worked in our complex and where he had worked before. Rampal had migrated from Madhya Pradesh 18 years ago to Punjab, where he worked in the garment industry, stitching clothes. He came to Gurugram a year ago because the work in Punjab was not secure. He had been earning about Rs 17,000 a month in Punjab and was now being paid Rs 10,000 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 10,000 a month by walking dogs of apartment owners, who paid Rs 5,000 per dog for an hour’s work — half an hour each 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 pet 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? 

Gurugram is booming with the growth of modern manufacturing and service industries, and attractive apartment complexes and shopping malls for upper-class people. It generates a variety of incomes and employment — for wealthy investors in venture capital and property firm 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 Gurugram went on strike to demand that their pay not be reduced. They could hardly make ends meet with the Rs 10,000 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 15 years, during UPA and NDA rule, that India must change the pattern of its economic growth, not just increase the size of its economy. Otherwise, the country will not be able to sustain growth or maintain social harmony. The policy response so far has been the ‘ostrich’ strategy. Bury your head in statistics to prove that 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 organised 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 organised 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 relationship 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 labour 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. 

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