Dr. Gayathri Vasudevan is on a deliberate course to change the future of India. Her vision? To train more than 10 million unskilled laborers by 2022.
Gayathri, who has a Ph.D. in Development Studies, first started looking at India’s labor practices while still in graduate school. Troubled that child labor was becoming common practice in the manufacturing industry, she joined a campaign to eradicate it. “I was idealistic back then,” she said. “But I soon realized advocacy wasn’t enough.” Not long after graduating, she abandoned her plan to pursue advocacy to join the International Labour Organization (ILO).
While working for the ILO, Gayathri heard Hillary Clinton, then Senator of New York, speak during a 2005 visit to India. At the time, Clinton was heavily advocating for the Indian government to support reciprocal outsourcing between the two countries. Not long before her visit, the dot-com boom of the late 1990s had spurred a rash of new jobs in the burgeoning computer technology industry, and India’s high-tech companies were snapping up the country’s graduates to fill openings. While so many were landing jobs at one of the shiny new IT enterprises, those with limited education were earning a few hundred rupees working the occasional odd job. It was as if the world was speeding past them without notice.
But one woman was taking notice.
Although the tech boom had created millions of jobs, they were primarily considered “formal” and only account for a tiny percentage of the country’s workforce. More than 90 percent of the country’s workforce is made up of informal jobs: brick layers, construction workers, plumbers, leather stitchers and other trade-based laborers. The more than half a billion workers employed in the informal sector have little to no access to benefits, contracts or job security. As a result, the sector is characterized by low skill levels, poor incentives and stagnant incomes that barely scratch above $2 a day.
A year after Clinton’s visit, Gayathri quit the ILO and moved to Bangalore to work for the Movement for Alternatives for Youth Awareness (MAYA), a nonprofit focused on creating an empowered and equitable society through education. With initial funding from the Ford Foundation and American India Foundation, she started LabourNet as a project with the goal of becoming a one-stop platform for informal sector workers to obtain services such as skills-based training, capacity-building and specialization programs, services traditionally accessible only to formal sector workers.
“We started looking at how to move from training to employability, but noticed there was a sizeable gap between skills and capabilities that needed to be addressed first,” Gayathri said. For Gayathri, the issues she was seeing weren’t due to unemployment but rather what she calls “underemployment.”
LabourNet, which transitioned into a social enterprise two years later, became an Acumen investee in 2013, and today designs vocational end-to-end training for individuals in the informal sector. Because most of these workers are poorly educated contract workers who compete in a saturated job market, investment in their training and education is nonexistent. Moreover, benefits, incentives and paid time off are unheard of, and their bargaining power for higher wages or better-paying jobs is practically nil. These are “nobody’s workers” as Gayathri says, despite the fact that they virtually — and invisibly — power the Indian economy.
One of India’s biggest skill gaps, for example, is found within the construction industry. For every job available, there is an overage of potential workers to fulfill them. However, the number of available positions far outweighs the number of construction workers with the appropriate skills. To address this, LabourNet has created work-integrated learning programs in partnership with large construction companies and building contractors. The programs provide onsite skills training like welding, scaffolding and carpentry as well as classroom learning on topics such as workplace safety. For the workers, the biggest areas of impact are on productivity, safety and income increases over the long term as they gain new capabilities to move up the employment ladder. As India continues its rapid development, LabourNet is helping address the gap between the high demand for skilled construction workers and the high percentages of laborers with low skill sets.
While men make up most of the country’s informal sector, women’s participation in the overall job market is suffering having been on the decline for the past decade. To bring more women into the workforce, LabourNet provides low-income women with training and employment opportunities close to home. In India’s rural areas and urban outskirts, job opportunities are particularly scarce and, with women traditionally seen as the primary household caretakers, migrating to cities in search of work simply isn’t possible. On top of that, few women have the chance to complete their education after the age of 16 when they are traditionally expected to get married and have children. So LabourNet has established more than 40 beauty and wellness training centers — or “livelihood-enabling centers” as the company refers to them — across the country to teach a variety of cosmetology skills that can help women gain employment as beauticians.
The students, most of whom are in their late teens to early 30s, attend classes six days a week for three hours each day to learn how to apply makeup, style hair, perform manicures, administer spa treatments, and more. On their one day off, they practice their new skills on family, friends, and each other so they’ll be ready to meet their clients with confidence when LabourNet matches them with nearby beauty parlors. For many of them, it will be their first time entering the job market. Today, more than 4,000 women have graduated from LabourNet’s free three-month training program.
Preparing these women for their first job is but one of the many benefits LabourNet offers. For Durga, a 2014 graduate from Hyderabad, the biggest benefit is the promise of having the earning potential to save money. “I want a job, so I can save money and don’t have to depend only on my husband,” she said. For her fellow classmate, Asma, she is fulfilling her parents’ wish for her by becoming independent. For the rest, it’s a combination of feeling beautiful, having the confidence to speak to people and imagining, possibly for the first time, a different kind of future. “My dream is to open several, like five or six, beauty salons. With fashion boutiques in them!” another graduate, Anita, said.
To date, LabourNet has provided vocational training for more than 300,000 individuals through 500 touch points that offer a total of 170 courses in 15 unique trades. But for Gayathri, it’s only the beginning.
“Training 10 million people may sound like a long way to go but, if we succeed, we’ll have reached a substantial part of the population,” she said. “More importantly, others will want to copy LabourNet. For us, it’s not about capturing the market. It’s about leading it. We don’t just want to change the model, we want to change the system. And imagine, if others follow suit, in 20 or 30 years we could transform the entire informal sector in India.”
