Gandhi and Hiring

As I mentioned in a prior post, we've gotten our data entry problem pretty well licked. So well, in fact, that we've finally completed the "primary survey" phase of REACH -- the one where huge phonebook-sized ledgers of every family in a village need to be laboriously keyed into a computer. We did this by hiring up our data entry workforce to 20 (it was somewhere between 12 and 15 when I started here) and working them all at 12-hour shifts (for 1.5 times their regular per-shift pay, but time-and-a-half overtime doesn't happen here).

But now, we have a problem. Steady-state need for data entry techs on this project is about 10. If we get some of the software fixes in place that I want to see, it might drop as low as 6 because entry can be made more efficient. What do we do with the remaining 10 to 14 people? On one hand, we're a public health project, not a jobs program. On the other, these are all young men from local villages who REALLY can use the rather paltry Rs 100/day they're being paid. Furthermore, if we just drop half of them from the pay roster right now, there's apparently some political risk -- they could in theory go and complain to village authorities (the panchayat council). Is there a legal right to their jobs? Probably not, but given the speed of the court system here and the NGO's desire to keep goodwill with the people, it's not a good thing to try to figure out.

It's interesting because the whole situation can, in some ways, be traced back to Gandhi. The Mahatma was a big believer in avoiding automation whenever there were humans available to do the work. This was one of the reasons he often carried around and used a spinning wheel -- to demonstrate to Indians his idea of a "village republic" where every village was an almost-self-sufficient unit of people doing work for themselves by hand. Much has since been said about this idea, and deconstruction of whether it contains the discredited "noble savage" concept at its roots is left to my readers with backgrounds in the humanities. Regardless, the application of Gandhian thinking to my problem seems clear -- there are people to do the work, so simply split the available work among all of them, and deal with the inefficiency that results. I can hardly blame India' vast reliance on slow/unreliable human labor entirely on Gandhi, but I can't help but think that these same ideals are the ones that have left most Indians unable to enjoy the quality brought by mass standardization.

Sadly for Gandhi-ji (but luckily for the organization's bank statements), our particular NGO does not quite believe in full employment at any cost. In time, these data entry operators will be leaving us; it's just a question of when. For now, they've been converted into field workers, assigned to go out to the anganwadi and collect the data that we know are missing. (They are proving remarkably bad at this task, mainly because they fail to collect data.) It has also allowed me the opportunity to institute something I've been wanting for weeks now, namely a system where every operator's entries are eventually double-checked by the supervisor, and a record is kept of errors discovered. That tracking is going to be used to justify letting someone go, and I'm not thrilled that I've fulfilled the classic stereotype of a consultant -- coming in and getting people fired. Still, even the people who leave will have more money than they otherwise might, and that ought to help their health a little.