Recasting India (25 page)

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 get 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.

 

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 Singh
²
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.

“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 product 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.