Blending socio-business and ecological concerns innovatively

Niranjan Khatri Nov 08, 2021

Bridging inequity

A metaphor often used is that when the rungs of a ladder get further apart, it is harder to climb. This is in the context of economic disparity in the world today. The rich are becoming richer and the poor getting poorer. See inequality report below.

In 1988, I received my transfer order to move to a remote island called Port Blair in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands from Chennai, I had mixed emotions: three parts chill, one part thrill down my spine. When I came for the landing run in Port Blair, the sheer breathtaking natural beauty of the islands instantly converted my emotions into four parts thrill!

As a kid, I used to dream of staying near sea and thick forest. This dream turned into a reality in Port Blair where my home faced the entry to the harbor and a 3,000 ft Mt Harriet, clad with thick tropical forest and a mini forest in the adjoining land next to my home.

I promised the Late Admiral Govil and the Conservator of Forest to tame the irresponsible practices of tourists who littered the pristine islands, without having an idea of what I would do as I was clueless about environmental issues.

Hence my journey in sustainable development started by introducing Extended Producer Responsibility or EPR. (I didn’t know this terminology back then and even now, it is gaining traction albeit very slowly). We put up stickers on cardboard lunch boxes: Please Don’t Litter the Island. Bring the Box back to the Hotel for Disposal. Thereafter, we intuitively got into resource optimisation: in energy, water, waste, phasing out CFC (it was not mandatory in 1988), got into circular economy and entered social domain by giving monthly help to a local orphanage with our limited financial resources. Our engineering team members: Carpenters, electricians and plumbers upgraded the dilapidated home of the orphan boys.

How did we try to bridge inequity?

We imparted the orphan boy’s vocational training for two hours after school hours, this helped them to get jobs locally,when they had to leave the orphanage at the age of 16. It is said that if you want to invest for six months, grow rice; if you want to invest for 20 years, grow trees and if you want to invest for 100 years, educate and empower the underserved. Many such orphan kids found jobs after vocational training.

After moving to the mainland, I started focusing on how to add value to the domestic help on a scale. The key competency of hotels is to make good food, deliver good service and focus on safety, security, hygiene and diplomacy. All these attributes are required in homes, though in a basic form for migrant workers who are clueless about such practices when they arrive in the cities.

To add value to the domestic help (DH) to make them a little professional, we developed a simple training toolkit for homes called the Domestic Help Training Programme, to be adopted voluntarily in city homes with pointers featured in it, as mentioned in the paragraph above.

The current reality for domestic helps is to learn the basics the hard, inelegant way in different homes, barring a minority where they are taught correct practices with dignity and respect. The programme received good response from many stakeholders, with some companies even putting it up in the intranet website of their companies for employees benefit. Some Delhi-based NGOs even started training domestic helps to work in a systematic manner. Trained domestic helps command a salary between Rs 40,000 and Rs 45,000 a month.

The Government of India has a Skills Council for domestic helps. Hopefully, our well-trained domestic helps will go to OECD countries where there is greying population to work and remit forex to their homes in India, like Sri Lankan workers remit $1 billion per year! Needless to mention, their rights must be protected by government oversight.

Changing our cognitive lens is of paramount importance proactively

In early 1990s, junior managers used to come to environment meetings in CII as the subject was considered peripheral to business. In late 90s, senior managers started filtering in the chambers meeting and in early 2000, CEOs started coming for such meetings. Today, with global challenges increasing in intensity, Environment Social Governance or ESG is mandated for large enterprises, with investors favoring companies with ESG practices.

In ESG, one of the areas data collected is the emission of an enterprise in the form of Scope 1, 2 to map the internal emission intensity and in Scope 3 requires that companies map the emission of its supply chain. In my view, in a similar way perhaps time has come for companies to nudge their employees to improve the lot of the DH working in their homes.

Every home after all is an economic entity where there are earnings, expenditures and practically all aspects of governance are carried out, including making a balance sheet by those who pay taxes! The companies demand from their subcontractors if they have paid the PF and ESI dues to the contract labourer's to the concerned authorities.

The young children will learn good practices being followed at homes and learn governance at a young age. Such ideas are often dismissed as “it is not the concern of the company to peek into the personal matters of their employees”, yet if the employees misbehave outside the fence of the company, the concerned people are hauled up because it tarnishes the image of the organisation.

May seem like a radical idea and not the norm, but in order to raise the ESG bar, such ideas can be seeded into the workforce to impart good inputs to DH as will be explained below.

Changing things is central to leadership. Changing them before anyone else is creativeness: Anon

Innovation begins when you challenge the norm

CSR is well known to stakeholders so there is an untapped opportunity ofdancing towards Individual Social Responsibility or ISR and this concept conforms to United Nation Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDG) no. 10 - Bridging inequalities.

How? The migrant crisis last year opened the minds of urban citizens to the true value of migrant labourers who provide us services as couriers, food providers, construction labourers and the most common people called domestic helps. Our domestic helps who come every day to care and tend our home lead lives that are still unorganised, unrecognised labour, voiceless and sometimes, exploited.

Here are some simple illustrative ways to get us started on the DH front and for construction labour:

Gold standards illustrative these points for domestic helps:

1. Basic induction at home when they join - communicate the work process at home - each home will have variation.

2. Check if they have a bank account, if not, help them to open an account. It is very intimidating for most of the domestic helps to go to a bank to open an account.

3. Insure domestic helps for Rs 2 lakh, annual premium is Rs 12 through any government bank a scheme. Apprise them about the PPF account. Enhance their financial literacy.

4. Enhance their skills in cooking, fire safety, soft skills, water and energy use. Most people do not know about three types of fire: a. General type of fire is due to burning of paper, wood, and cloth. This type of fire can be doused by water, or even a thick cloth. b. Oil fire - do not put water and cover it with a fire blanket if you have one, or use any thick bed sheet or tarpaulin as the idea is to cut oxygen supply. c. Electrical fire is where water must NOT be used as the person can get electrocuted, the main switch needs to be turned off and use CO2 for putting off the fire.

5. A flowing tap creates illusion of plenty but reality is grim on the water front. India and many parts of the world are water stressed. Hence, it is imperative to empower our domestic helps with this reality and show them how to reduce water consumption while washing dishes, or any other water related tasks given to them.

6. Organise free health camps including general checkups and eye care. Apprise them about GoI schemes.

7. In spare time, impart free tuition to their children.

8. Supporting any special talent in sports, music and handicrafts.

9. Some adult literacy helps. If a register is opened for them, their name can be written in a dotted form which they can join before starting work, in this simple way they will learn to sign their name.

10. Give simple advice for their home on health, resource management like water management, clean cooking stoves, low cost renewable energy devices and bank of nutrition, explaining them the importance of local ecosystems like local lakes, flora and fauna and local forests.

Request the hospitality sector share this with the HR department with instructions to share the note with all managers/ staff so that the invisible pillars of the country become more holistically skilled and learn financial literacy to make them self-reliant in times of crisis. Many crisis are ahead of us due to climate emergency and lackadaisical use of water globally. Maybe in a collaborative approach, the hotels can start common training hubs in different parts of the cities for the domestic helps to be trained professionally by our associates.

We are not going to become a great country unless we upgrade the skills of the labour fraternity with professional inputs in the informal sector with the help of our widely distributed formal sector workforce. After all, we all believe in distributed leadership. Let us leverage our staff in this path-breaking direction.

Similarly, the following checklist can be adopted for construction site workers to help them lead a dignified life and enhance their self-esteem.

Gold standards illustrative points for construction labour

1. Basic induction at site when they join. Communicate the work process at workplace: Housekeeping of materials.

2. Insure site workers for Rs 2 lakh. Annual premium is Rs 12 through any bank. Apprise them about the PPF account.

3. Enhance their skills in basic digital literacy, carpentry, electrical and masonry work, soft skills, fire safety, use of water optimally.

4. Covid-19 appropriate behaviour at workplace and homes.

5. Provide clean, ventilated accommodation and clean bathrooms in labour colonies.

6. Cooking space for bulk cooking or for families with solar hybrid electric connection.

7. Demonstrate resource efficient health improving products/ ideas at project sites like smokeless Chula, drip irrigation device, rural rainwater harvesting and setting bank of nutrition.

This list is not comprehensive and may vary from place to place. Some points from the domestic section can be applied in this section too. Sometimes we do not need financial resources to get things done for marginalised stakeholders. It is the intent which helps unleash our creativity. This is the key message of this article! The ideas featured here are not theory but have been applied on the ground.

In conclusion, I would like to end this article with Dr Martin Luther King’s quote: “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the creative light of altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgement. Life’s persistent and most urgent question is what are you doing for others?”

The views expressed are that of the author