R Jagannathan: Affirmative action and inaction

MICROVIEW

Successful businessmen are not known for burying their heads in sand, but I don't find CII and Ficci discussing how they should be implementing affirmative action in the private sector.

High time they did. It is easy to say that affirmative action should begin with education, but the problem is that our education system is seriously flawed "" even for the upper classes.

It should not take 17-19 years of school and college to learn the basic competencies needed for most jobs, but unfortunately that is what the Indian school system is all about. It is an elaborate scheme to keep the better-off sections away from the job market as long as possible. Dalits can't afford this merry-go-round.

Look at the cost-benefit ratio: If one assumes school-related expenses to be around Rs 1,000 per month per child in most cities, the opportunity cost of putting a kid through school and college (at the current PPF rate of 8 per cent) is around Rs 4-5 lakh for each child over the 17 years it takes from KG to a simple bachelor's degree.

And after all this, the average salary you will get is around Rs 5,000-8,000 per month. (I am, of course, leaving out the extremes, because their numbers are a small percentage of the graduating population).

A monthly return of Rs 5,000-8,000 on an invested corpus of Rs 5 lakh is like giving yourself an annuity of around 12-16 per cent when you can earn 8 per cent tax-free in PPF without even working.

If the economics of education is so adverse even for people who can afford it, why suggest the same for those who can't? Dalits simply don't have the money or the time to waste on this kind of "education".

Even if we assume that the government is going to foot the bill, society as a whole would be better off spending the money elsewhere.

Against this backdrop, the question businessmen must ask themselves in not "whether" they should be doing affirmative action, but "how". But before that it is necessary to dispel some myths about "merit". The word means different things to different people.

For the person who's just entering the job market, merit means academic excellence. For Dalits and others who can't wave a high-90s marksheet in a recruiter's face, merit is an entry barrier erected by society to deny them a decent job.

For the corporate recruiter, merit should merely mean competence "" the ability to do a job well. It is not ultimately about marks and academic brilliance.

Going by the corporate recruiter's definition, affirmative action immediately becomes a possibility. The truth is you don't need 17-19 years of education to do most corporate jobs competently.

Any adult, with just two or three years of targeted learning and exposure to elementary language and arithmetic skills, can do most non-specialised jobs in any office. He may not become a heart surgeon or civil engineer, but most other jobs will fall within his area of competence with just some additional training.

On the other hand, competence and job success depend not so much on the initial fund of knowledge one acquires in school but on the willingness to learn and determination to succeed.

Today, most companies prefer to employ women in many areas not because they bring great new skills (though there is some of that as well), but because they bring in better attitudes and a will to succeed.

As a general rule, the disadvantaged always bring a greater determination to succeed than the rest. Applying the same logic to Dalits and minorities, I believe they will bring a greater motivation to succeed against the odds.

If we accept this assumption, the job of preparing them for specific job competencies is easier. Hiring Dalits may add to your competitive advantage.

The corporate sector should, therefore, work on a new agenda for affirmative action. The first thing to do is an internal audit "" two of them, in fact. One should check how many members of the poorer sections they are actually employing, and at what levels.

The other audit will involve assessing jobs where the skills/knowledge needed can be easily imparted to anyone. These are the jobs where affirmative action should be first targeted. Obviously, the jobs so targeted should not be the traditional low-status ones like sweepers and security personnel.

Two, based on the above audits, companies need to earmark an HR budget for making investments in identifying and training people from the target groups of Dalits and other backward castes.

Three, since the bigger companies typically outsource jobs where the skillsets required are of a routine nature "" payrolls, transport, office services, etc "" they need to extend the ambit of affirmative action to companies from whom they outsource, perhaps by giving them preferential treatment in contracts.

Bottomline: Affirmative action is not about charity. It is about building workplace diversity and competitive advantage by using the innate motivations of the disadvantaged to succeed in life.

rjagann@business-standard.com