MOTIVATING THE YOUNG
Subroto Bagch, Chairman, Odisha Skill Development Authority, on encouraging young minds to work hard
Subroto Bagchi has been many things, beginning as a lower division clerk in a government office and becoming executive chairman of Mindtree, one of India’s most admired software services companies. Since 2016, he has been chairman of Odisha Skill Development Authority, doing the job with immense enthusiasm and pro bono. He’s been an entrepreneur, a business leader, an author and a public servant but he considers himself to be a salesman first. Whether it was closing a new customer acquisition, getting a better deal on a bank loan, negotiating a lease while renting space or convincing a potential employee to sign on the dotted line, he was being a salesman. Now with the Odisha Skill Development Authority, he is skilling 8 lakh young people—mostly school drop outs— and has already achieved a target of 6.3 lakh. In that capacity, he says he has to sell concepts and ideas every day to a ecosystem of stakeholders from government agencies to private skill development partners to the young men and women.
IS THERE A SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT AMONG YOUNG PEOPLE TODAY? THE IDEA THAT WORK IS A CURSE?
The idea that hard work is a bad thing is limited only to a few of the entitled. I see it mostly among upper-middle class parents. First, they give children a great education, egg them on to compete hard, then the young one gets the so-called “dream job” and moves to a different city perhaps. Within a couple of years, the parents whine about how their child is being made to work so hard. In the process, slowly, the young person begins to dislike the idea of work. On the con-
trary, children of no-entitlement have a lot of motivation to succeed. They are willing to work really hard, they are grateful there is work. I see it in my travels all the time. But in smaller jobs, the difficulty is, you have to be lucky to be appreciated. Small folks in small jobs need the same appreciation that our children do. When that doesn’t come, young people can lose the sense of purpose. Appreciation can make sweat taste sweet.
WHAT HAVE YOU DISCOVERED ABOUT YOUNG PEOPLE IN YOUR JOURNEY AS CHAIRMAN OF ODISHA SKILL DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY?
In the last two years, I have travelled more than 30,000 km by road alone in Odisha, across 30 districts. During the course, I had the opportunity to personally get to know 500 role models, people who come from the bottom of the pyramid whose stories would inspire anyone. I met a young lady named Muni Tiga. Born to a tribal family with seven siblings, she lost her father when she was young. She was ridiculed in her village for cycling 30 km each day to go to school. She is the first girl in her village to go to school. From there, she went to an ITI (Industrial Training Institute) where she took up a two-year course in electronics. Selected as a locomotive pilot in the Indian Railways, today she hauls the Shatabdi Express.
I also met Basanti Pradhan, a goatherd’s daughter. Failed in Class 10, enrolled for a two-and-half-month training in industrial sewing machine operation. Left her remote village in Odisha at 18 for Tirupur in Tamil Nadu. In four years, she has risen to be a supervisor in her plant. She paid for elder sister’s marriage and then her own and worked even after marriage. And now, with a dual income family, she and her husband have come close to becoming middle-class. When I look at countless such stories, of hope, grit, displacement and human transformation, I begin to understand the real meaning in the phrase that the meek shall inherit the earth.
YOU ARE ALSO ENCOURAGING START-UPS WITH NOVEL EXPERIMENTS?
Yes. The idea is to create tiny enterprises by connecting a skill trainee from a government programme or an ITI with philanthropic capital. This is not just to make them stand on their own legs by starting a small business but to make them think of employing a person or two. When that becomes the goal, many things change. We call these young people “Nano-Unicorns”. Internet start-ups such as Flipkart, OLA or Paytm are called Unicorns—that get a valuation of a billion dollars. We need those but India’s real progress requires millions of Nano-Unicorns. Small folks, tiny business in a small place that, in time, would have the potential to create a job or two.
We locate a young person with an entrepreneurial streak. That person writes a “dream sheet” on a page. It says what she would do if she had a lakh of rupees. She defends her case in front of a panel. If she is selected, she is off to a week-long, residential “mini-MBA”. At the end, she is given a lakh of rupees from a philanthropic source whose only goal is to see the capital come back someday and light up another life. As the Nano-Unicorn takes off, we bring them back every quarter for capturing the narrative, debottlenecking their hurdles. The beauty of the programme is, the money is disbursed with collateral and is honour-based. There are high net worth individuals who want to engage at the grassroot level entrepreneurship development. We hope they would come forward to support the scaling up of the programme in days to come.
WHY HAVE ALL CENTRAL GOVERNMENT EFFORTS AT SKILL DEVELOPMENT BEEN SO INCOMPLETE?
I wouldn’t say “incomplete”. There are many great initiatives but today, the sheer size of the beast has become so large. We are talking about 1.3 billion people, millions of school drop outs. There are many big challenges for all of us. There is information asymmetry. Then we have a social stigma against the skilled worker. We pay poor wages, even as government stipulated “minimum wage”; that minimum wage is abysmal. An ITI graduate starts with `8,000 or 10,000 a month. A peon gets closer to `20,000. Then there is the huge problem of lack of high quality organisations in skill training. Most are mediocre or gold diggers. They attract poor quality trainers. Abysmal worker housing in metros and large cities force migrant skill workers to become slum dwellers. Barring a handful of enlightened employers, most look at a skilled worker as “labour”; the private sector hasn’t really done anything substantive in terms of human capital development. And then there is the issue of lack of entrepreneurial avenues for the skill trainees. In order to break through these man-made barriers, we need serious empathy for the skilled worker. All of us must look at the skill story beyond fund allocations and schemes. Skill is just a piece. The narrative is human transformation.
THE PRIVATE SECTOR HASN’T REALLY DONE ANYTHING SUBSTANTIVE IN TERMS OF HUMAN CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT