By Anand Giridharadas
International Herald TribuneThursday, October 11, 2007
Manohar Lakshmipathi does not own a computer. In fact, workmen like Manohar, a house painter, are usually forbidden to touch clients' computers on the job here.So you can imagine Manohar's wonder as he sat dictating his date of birth, phone number and work history to a secretary who entered them into a computer. Afterward, a man took his photo. Then, with a click of a mouse, Manohar's very own social-networking page popped onto the World Wide Web, the newest profile on Babajob.com.
Babajob, an Indian start-up aiming to bring the Facebook/MySpace revolution to the world's poor, is just one example of an unanticipated byproduct of the outsourcing boom: Entrepreneurs and large multinationals are making India a hub of computer innovation targeting the poor.
Outsourcing brought hundreds of multinationals and hundreds of thousands of techies to Bangalore. Now, more than a decade into the outsourcing surge, many of those companies and their employees are applying their skills not just to developing software, but to confronting the grinding poverty around them too."In Redmond, you don't see 7-year-olds begging on the street," said Sean Blagsvedt, Babajob's founder, referring to Microsoft's Washington State headquarters, where he once worked. "In India, you can't escape the feeling that you're really lucky. So you ask, 'What are you going to do about all the stuff around you? How are you going to use all these skills?' "Perhaps for less altruistic reasons, but often with positive effects for the poor, corporations have made India a lab for extending modern technological conveniences to those long deprived. Nokia, for instance, develops many of its ultracheap cellphones here. Citibank first experimented here with a special ATM that recognizes thumbprints to help slum-dwellers who struggle with personal identification numbers. And Microsoft has made India one of the major centers of its global research group that is studying technologies for the poor, like software that reads to illiterate computer users.
Babajobs is a quintessential example of how Indian back offices have spawned poverty-inspired innovation. The best-known networking sites connect the computer-savvy elite to one another. Babajob, by contrast, connects the Indian elite to the poor at their doorsteps, people who need jobs but lack the connections to find them. Job seekers advertise skills, employers advertise jobs and matches are made through "friend-of-a-friend" networks.For example, if Rajeev and Sanjay are friends, and Sanjay needs a chauffeur, he can surf onto Rajeev's page, travel onto the page of Rajeev's chauffeur and then see which of the chauffeur's friends happen to be looking for similar work.
Blagsvedt, 31, joined Microsoft in Redmond in 1999. Three years ago, he was sent to India to help build the local office of Microsoft Research, the company's in-house institute.But the Microsoft employees who worked here led very different lives than their counterparts back home. They had servants and laborers. They read newspaper tales of undernourishment and illiteracy. The Indian employees were not seeing such conditions for the first time, but many of them felt newly empowered to confront them.Equipped with world-class computing skills, many felt an urge to do something to help their society.At the same time, Microsoft, with software piracy limiting revenues in India, was looking to low-income consumers as a vast commercial opportunity, so engineers' altruistic urges were encouraged.
In Blagsvedt's research office, poverty became a major focus. Anthropologists and sociologists were hired to explain things like the effect of the caste system on rural computer usage. One day, in the course of that work, Blagsvedt stumbled on an insight by a Duke University economist that first unnerved and then inspired him.The economist, Anirudh Krishna, found that many poor Indians in dead-end jobs stay poor not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack the connections to discover such jobs. Any Bangalorean could confirm the observation: the city teems with laborers desperate for work, and yet wealthy software tycoons complain endlessly about a shortage of maids and cooks.
Blagsvedt's epiphany? "We need village LinkedIn!" he recalled saying, referring to a professional networking site. He quit Microsoft and, with his stepfather, Ira Weise, and a former Microsoft colleague, built a social-networking site to connect the yuppies of Bangalore with its wage laborers. (The site, which Blagsvedt began this summer and runs out of his home, focuses on Bangalore for now, with plans to spread to other Indian cities and perhaps globally.)Building a site meant to reach laborers earning $2 to $3 a day presented special challenges. The workers would be unfamiliar with computers in general and with Babajob in particular. Moreover, wealthy employers would be reluctant to let random applicants tend to their gardens or their newborns.
To deal with the connectivity problem, Babajob pays anyone, from charities to Internet cafe owners, to find job seekers and register them. (Babajob earns its keep from employers' advertisements, diverting a portion of that to those who sign up job seekers.) Also, instead of creating an anonymous job bazaar, Babajob replicates online the process by which Indians hire in real life: using chains of personal connections.In India, a businessman looking for a chauffeur might ask his friend, who might ask his chauffeur. Such connections provide a kind of quality control. The friend's chauffeur, for instance, will not recommend a hoodlum, for fear of losing his own job.
To recreate this dynamic online, Babajob pays people to be "connectors" between employer and employee. In the example above, the businessman's friend and his chauffeur would each earn the equivalent of $2.50 if they connected the businessman with someone he likes.The model is gaining attention, and praise. A Bangalore venture capitalist, when told of Babajob, immediately asked to be put in touch with Blagsvedt."Wow," said Steve Pogorzelski, president of the international division of Monster.com, the American jobs site, when told of the company. "It is an important innovation," he said, "because it opens up the marketplace to people of socioeconomic levels who may not have the widest array of jobs available to them."Krishna, the Duke economist, praised the idea as a "very significant innovation," but he cautioned that the very poor may not belong to the social networks that would bring them to Babajob.
In its first few months, the company has drummed up job seekers on its own, sending workers out into the streets with fliers promising employment.When it comes to potential employers, in addition to counting on word of mouth among those desperate for maids and laborers, Babajob is also counting on Babalife, the company's parallel social networking site. People listed on Babalife will automatically be on Babajob, as well.So far, more than 1,100 have registered on Babajob. The listings are a portrait of the floating underclass in India, millions and millions seeking a few dollars a day to work as chauffeurs, nannies, gardeners, guards and receptionists.A woman named Selvi Venkatesh was desperate. "I am really in need of a job, as our residential building collapsed last month in Ejipura," she said, referring to a disaster in July that killed two people, including an infant, according to The Times of India.I
n Blagsvedt's apartment, Manohar, the painter, professed hope. He earns $100 a month. Jobs come irregularly, and so he spends up to three months of the year idle. Between jobs, he borrows from loan sharks to feed his wife and children. They levy 10 percent monthly interest, enough to make a $100 loan a $314 debt in one year.Manohar wants his three children to walk a different path. They must not know his pain, he said; they should work in a nice office. So he spends nearly half his income on private schooling for them. That is why he was at Babajob in a swiveling chair, staring at a computer screen, dreaming of more work.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/10/asia/jobs.php
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