A helping hand

It’s amazing what you can communicate through your actions. I’ve been told that standing with your arms crossed over your chest signals defensiveness or resistance while standing with open palms signals receptivity and openness. In fact, it is widely believed that over 90% of our communication is non-verbal. But what does that mean for cyberspace? How do you communicate if all you’re doing is surfing the web? Well here’s what I know about you: 1) Since you’ve made it this far down the paragraph you can read English. 2) You’re on a blog so you can handle basic technology 3) It is likely that you own a personal or household computer (assumption - people who sign into blogs are comfortable enough with technology to either own a personal or household computer). Is this certain? Absolutely not. But it’s a starting point. If you’re in India then it tells me that you live in one of the 1.4% of urban households that have PCs with internet facilities (as per 2002 data from the government of India - it’s outdated but was the most convenient data available). Though that number has likely increased considerably over the last eight years, it serves as a good lower bound for our purposes. There were 53.7 million households in India as per the 2001 census (closest data to 2002 figure above) so if you’re in India, that would put you in one of approximately 751,790 households somewhere in a city or town.

Now on to some economic theory. In simple economic models you typically have two agents - firms and households. Firms use inputs such as labour, land, and capital (buildings and machines) to produce goods and services. Households supply the inputs and consume the goods and services produced by these firms. Looking just at labour, it means that firms hire the labour that households supply. Very simply, you (a member of a household) would go to a company to look for a job. But things get a little complicated with domestic help. Households often serve a dual role where they hire labour as well. While households supply labour to firms (think of people working in cubicles) they also demand/ consume labour (think of your cook). What that means is that households also act as employers.

The next assumption I’m going to make is that someone who owns a computer in India is also going to have domestic help (either part-time or full-time). That assumption doesn’t hold true for many other nations but the abundance of labour in India and scarcity of capital would imply that those with access to capital (computer/ laptop) are very likely to also have domestic help. This is compounded by cultural trends. What that would imply is that you, the reader in India, have or currently do hire some form of domestic help (at the household level). Congratulations! You have generated employment.

But enough of the technical babble. Why is this important? Let me explain through some anecdotes.

The middle-aged gentleman who delivers the morning paper to our house in Kolkata has a welcoming smile. As a kid, I’d answer the door when he rang the bell and run over to my mother and tell her that he wanted to talk to her. I’ve only seen him in a pale yellow half sleeve shirt and darkish brown pants. It is possible that those are some of the few articles of clothing he owns. He typically stopped by at the end of the month to collect his pay check and spent some time chatting with my mom. Years later, I learnt what his conversations were about.

Mr. Pandey has three children – a daughter and two sons. Though uneducated himself, he did everything he could to put his kids through school. I’m not sure if he had any plans for after that but something fantastic happened. His daughter – the oldest of the three – cracked a difficult exam and got admitted to a reputable engineering college. The girl’s mother was worried – it would be difficult to get a daughter with a college degree married. But Mr. Pandey would have none of it. He accompanied his daughter to the college to see what his responsibilities were as her parent. He soon learnt that he barely had enough money in the bank to pay the first semester’s tuition fees. The girl wanted to leave but he struck a deal with the dean. He would figure out a way to make subsequent payments if she was allowed to start. The dean accepted.

Over the next few weeks Mr. Pandey went around to all the houses he delivered papers to and let them know of his predicament. His clients pledged to support him and rotated the payments in instalments. He would stop by to give them periodic updates. Today his daughter works for Cognizant Technologies, a major IT solutions and consulting company in India. Both his sons are training to be chartered accountants and have cleared the first stage of the process.

The other gentleman in the story is someone I grew up with. Mithilesh da works as our driver but he’s actually a part of the family - I went to kindergarten on his shoulders. His father was a driver in the local police force and worked in Calcutta. He stayed back in the village and didn’t end up completing middle school. However, the boy had a rare talent for operating motor vehicles and came to the city in search of a job. He’s been with us since he was nineteen.

Nearly two decades later Mithilesh da is a father himself. His son, Golu, is an enterprising young fellow. While still in middle-school, he set up a bank account and sold wax candles that he made by hand. The profits went into a rainy day fund. The boy is in high school now and full of energy and promise. But Mithilesh da doesn’t necessarily know what to do with Golu and is contemplating jobs he can pursue once he finishes up with school. Relatively high on his list is the position of driver.

So what is the point of all of this? The point is guidance. What separates Golu and Mr. Pandey’s children is not necessarily ability. It is the guidance provided by their parents or mentors. It would have been easy for Mr. Pandey to get his sons jobs as newspaper delivery boys instead of urging them to be accountants. Doing something different was brave and sets him apart from the norm. Mithileshda, on the other hand, is doing what comes to him naturally – he is teaching his son the trade he practices, in much the same way that he was taught by his father.

However, there are some trades that perhaps should not stay in a family. If the washerwoman teaches her daughter how to wash clothes from a young age then it is very likely what she will end up doing. Without a long term goal in mind, such as setting up a small laundry business, the next generation will not necessarily be better off - there will be little financial capital generated. These are not jobs with defined career paths or employee retirement/ pension plans. Furthermore, these are not jobs with inflation indexed wages. If the cost of vegetables continues to rise at a double digit rate in India while wages stay where they are, individuals who live from pay check to pay check will be put in a very difficult place. The poor will continue to stay poor – in fact, they might become even poorer. Their way out of the problem might be to produce more kids and get them to work as quickly as possible – perpetuating the cycle.

But, if you want, there is something you can do to help. You can take an interest in the academic pursuits of the children of your domestic help. I don’t mean taking on the financial responsibility – that would be an unfair burden. I mean serving as a mentor. You could ask how they are doing in class and if there is anything you can help with. Ask the children what they want to do in the future and provide them with some guidelines on how to get there. Perhaps create an incentive system based on performance. Studies show that kids whose parents take an interest in their studies perform better than those whose parents don’t. In this case, the parents are often uneducated and don’t know any better. Despite their best intentions, they might not be able to help. People like Mr. Pandey are in the minority. By stepping in as a mentor, you could have a meaningful impact on the decisions these kids take and correspondingly on their future. A monthly meeting might be all it takes for a kid to start performing better on tests or to develop an interest in staying on in school. That interest might result in a college education and a job that pays significantly more than his/her parents could have imagined. Earlier in the article we estimated that there were likely at least 750,000 households in India employing domestic help. If you live in one of those households then your opportunity to help literally walks through your doors every morning or perhaps a few times a week.


Ps. Golu now takes spoken English courses and has joined a computer training center which promises to hire the students it trains.