Clearly, rural jobs will transform and rural wages will increase when we are able to open urban opportunities to rural residents. For this, we need to move work to the worker, as opposed to the worker to work. In the absence of these efforts, while we may be staring at a modest 7–8 per cent official unemployment rate In India, disguised unemployment will continue to gnaw at the rural ecosystem.
In my conversations with B.P. Biddappa, executive director, HUL, and chief people, transformation and sustainability officer, South Asia, it was extremely heartening to know that in setting up factories in rural areas, Unilever is also running a sustainable community development initiative, Prabhat, which builds on local community needs at the grassroots level. Having undertaken a baseline survey across all sites, the company has identified key employable skills that would be of value to the community.
Prabhat’s ‘livelihood centres’ are now bringing positive change by enhancing both employability and income generation among rural communities. Today, they conduct training in spoken English, beauty and hair care, tailoring, web and graphic design, laptop and mobile repair, welding and other skills. So far, over 1,30,000 people have been given skill-based training and have been certified.
Tata Steel, similarly, runs nine JNTVTI (J.N. Tata Vocational Training Institute) centres across their production sites in Jharkhand, Odisha and Maharashtra. Over 10,000 students have been trained in twenty-one different trades and placed in the last seven years. Through a curriculum that has been developed in-house, these institutes train rural folks and help generate employment for them.
In fact, all the vendors of the company are offered added incentives should they hire people from these places. Zubin Palia, group chief human resources and industrial relations at Tata Steel, explained to me that the company’s vision is to become the best skills supplier in the world.
Yes, there are a few and growing examples of big-company initiatives to create rural employment. But where is the large-scale evidence of the success of this model, you may ask. Clearly, the use case for taking work from India to Bharat will not come from asking who else has done it.
Instead, it will come from challenging our deeply entrenched city-centred, office-centred view of work. This, in turn, will happen if we take an ecosystem view of the new model of technology-enabled remote work and not see it as a tactical policy around the privilege of working from home for a lucky few.
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In the meantime, we do have some examples from across the world where radical attempts are being made to move work away from big cities to small towns. The small country of Croatia, with a population the size of the Indian city of Surat, is offering ‘digital nomad visas’ and encouraging large-city workers from overseas to come and stay for extended periods in the country. On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, countries like Japan are putting money where their mouth is.
They, in fact, offer 1 million yen per child to families, to encourage them to leave Tokyo in favour of rural areas. It will be worthwhile to also mention that there are many such programmes already running in the US, in states like Oklahoma, Alabama and Kansas.
Back to India—my research has identified at least ten factors that can promote remote work. Interestingly, these factors are, in turn, influenced by a wider adoption of remote work.
These include: i) Universal access to reliable broadband networks across India, ii) Urban decongestion, iii) Carbon emission control, iv) Commuting woes in the big cities, v) Rural living conditions and quality of life in small towns vi) Changes in employment and career models, vii) Willingness to hire from rural/small town talent, viii) Changes in managerial mindsets and approaches, ix) Changes in HR policies and processes, and x) Designing, building and leading new-age fluid organizations.
Each of the above factors should be examined from the point of view of what the future of work offers to countries like India. If we decide to integrate employment generation and rural development within the broader framework of the future of work, we will generate several new work opportunities.
A lot more needs to be done both at the policy level and in terms of changing mindsets. As Biddappa of HUL says, ‘We must break the umbilical cord of needing to see people assembled physically in a room.’
Employers also need to make a lot of changes to their conventional HR systems and practices in the areas of sourcing, recruiting, training, monitoring and assessment of work, while overall engaging better with their workforce. It is through these changes that we will be able to shape the future of work to benefit Bharat.
If you think these changes are optional, you may be mistaken. While for the current generation of organizations these may look like unnecessary experiments, for the next generations these changes would be natural expectations. The next chapter will discuss in detail what Gen Z and the other generations that will follow will expect and demand from us to integrate Bharat with India.
Since the next generations will constitute a big vote bank, it will also compel politicians to address the urgent issues of taking jobs to rural India and also creating jobs in the hinterland.
This excerpt from Chandrasekhar Sripada’s ‘Shaping the Future of Work’ has been published with permission from Penguin Random House India.