A Building Site in Bangalore

Spending all day on a building site in Bangalore may not be most people's idea of a reason to feel grateful for life's opportunities. But that's what I did on Wednesday this week and that's how it made me feel.

I was down in Bangalore supervising the pilot stage of a research project we are doing at the moment. I won't bore you with the details, but it involves evaluating an initiative undertaken by a local NGO to assess the skills of labourers working in the informal construction sector. There are a lot of people doing this kind of work in India - putting in long, hard hours - and they live a fairly precarious existence, traveling wherever the work is and with no contractual protections. They've very rarely had any kind of formal education and the skills they have have been picked up on the job, with no formal recognition at all. So the idea of the project is to recognise and certify their skills, facilitating access to work and further training, as part of India's wider efforts to train its population. As a policy specialist, most of my work is done at a computer or in meetings; it's not all that often I get to see what's happening at the ground level. This was a rare exception.

Building sites in India are, by and large, hot, dusty, noisy and relentless. There's often very little shade. The workers slog under the sun before squatting in the unfinished buildings to eat their lunch. Underfoot is pretty much a mass of rubble; strange struts of metal stick at random angles out of bare concrete staircases. Mechanisation is usually minimal; bricks are either carried up flights of stairs on people's heads, or hauled up by pulleys. This is not an easy existence.

In Bangalore, there was a girl in a red outfit with a toddler hoisted on her hip. She looked about seven or eight at most. My colleague from the local NGO asked why she wasn't in school; she ducked her head and wouldn't say a word. Her father explained that he couldn't afford to send all of his children to school. Some would get an education, some wouldn't, he said. She was needed to take care of her little brother. Like her parents, she will probably remain illiterate.

We interviewed a number of workers for the pilot. Of course I couldn't understand what was being said, but a translator was to hand. At one point, one said that "the big people" had come and asked him to take the assessment. Big people, I asked? He means the NGO folk, I was told. But we are all big people to him. We have an education.

I didn't feel like a very big person at that point in time; I just felt like a very lucky person. I wanted to ask, does that mean he sees himself as a small person? Is that just accepted? But I felt foolish. There's no way I can understand the perspective of someone whose start in life has been so utterly different from my own. And no amount of liberal hand-wringing about inequality or caste can change the fact that, for him, that's just the reality of his world.

Our research partner commented that he thought it was impressive that I was willing to come to places like this; most people wouldn't bother, he said. I tried to explain that I see it as an extraordinary privilege. In my work I've had the opportunity to meet village women in Ghana, labourers in India, policy makers and researchers from countries across the world. Every one brought fresh perspective to me and enriched my world. I know that the villagers and labourers will never have the chance to broaden their horizons in the way I have, and that their lives will likely be hard until the day they die. Meeting them, even briefly, is humbling and something for which I'm incredibly grateful.

Back home, my friends are posting about their excitement at being part of the Olympics, and I have to admit to feeling a twinge of regret at not being there to participate in the spectacle. But on the whole, I'm glad I'm here instead.

Working and sleeping

Among the many things that struck me about Delhi in the first few days of living here is that there are a lot of sleeping people. People sleep everywhere, all the time. You can't walk five minutes without coming across someone slumbering happily, sometimes in what look like quite uncomfortable positions:

The various tombs in Lodi Gardens and elsewhere are especially popular, understandably so given their almost miraculous coolness even during the worst of the afternoon heat.

Given this tendency, you might be forgiven for wondering if the British colonial forces weren't right to dismiss Indians as feckless and lazy. But after a while you notice something else: for every five people sleeping, fifty are working bloody hard. We notice the sleepers because sleeping in public is something we in the West are mostly unaccustomed to (and to which we attach very particular and culturally-specific connotations, mostly negative). But that's only part of the story.

When you really look at what's going on, you realise that this is an incredibly hardworking city. When I walk down the street here I am surrounded by people toiling away to make their daily bread, whether it's carting around precariously-stacked goods or entire families on the back of a bike, standing for hours under a burning sun flogging chilled water to passers-by, or building one of the thousands of constructions going up all across the city. There's one just outside my flat:

There are an awful lot of people involved in putting this building up. I am not entirely sure what they all do. However, I do know what three of the poor buggers did today, which is spend the entire day reducing those piles of rocks you can see outside the house from the enormous mounds they started off as this morning. Their method of doing so is illustrated here:

Scoop, lift, walk, throw, repeat. This, mind you, in 35 degree heat and 80% humidity. Pampered Westerner that I am, I would collapse with a migraine after about half an hour.

However, Indians are not superhuman. All this frenzied activity in this climate is exhausting, and we all need to rest now and then. For many inhabitants of Delhi, though, they spend so much of their time working that sleep becomes something to be grabbed whenever the opportunity presents itself. Hence the prone bodies scattered across the city. Far from being an indicator of laziness, I think it's a sign of just how hard many people have to work to survive here.

I really hope that people doing jobs like this get to share in India's rising prosperity. God knows they've worked for it.

Call centres and competition

If you are in the UK, you may have seen recently that a telecoms company has decided to close its call centre in Mumbai after three years in the city and relocate it to Burnley, Lancashire. After successive years of high inflation and increasingly high wage expectations among skilled Indian staff, the rationale behind outsourcing has vanished. And reading between the lines of the quotes from the company's spokesperson, it seems that customers have had a problem with the Indian accent and would rather get information and help on their mobile phone issues in the "quite pleasant" Lancashire tones. Also reading between the lines, one suspects that UK customers found customer service skills in the Mumbai office not entirely up to scratch.

Economic reality, or pandering to prejudiced customers? Probably a bit of both, if we're honest. But it's a worrying development for India, which has done famously well out of the outsourcing trade and which continues to see it as an engine for growth. The sector, though, is uniquely vulnerable to becoming uncompetitive, as this case shows - and if people really do prefer a Lancashire accent, New Call's competitors will be looking keenly at what happens next.

In one sense this is good news for India. The country has a wealth of talent, and the potential to move beyond the easily-dismissed image of a country of call centres and cheap remote tutors and become a genuine technological leader. Indian firms like Wipro and Tata are already showing that this can be done and that they can be world beaters. But the worry is that there are not enough Wipros and Tatas to pick up the pieces if the bottom falls out of India's call centre and BPO sector.

This recent article from a professor at the University of Delhi lays the blame at the door of the Indian higher education system - a relic, surprise surprise, of British colonialism - which is adept at instilling technical know-how but fails to encourage enough innovation or entrepreneurship. Pavan K Varma's brilliant book Being Indian makes a similar point, and asks whether Indians are content to remain as "techno coolies", in the patronising but ruthlessly apt terms that has become commonplace.

But as New Call's decision indicates, they may not have a choice. The question is whether India can diversify its economy - and its education system - quickly enough to allow its citizens to stay competitive in a swiftly changing economy.

As Arthur Dudney points out, this means embracing a liberal university education that incorporates the strengths of Indian heritage, rather than being limited to a narrowly defined technocratic set of goals. But it also means a massive broadening out of what are seen as aspirational jobs in India. It's perfectly laudable to want to be a doctor or an IT consultant. But if young Indians aren't encouraged and empowered to achieve success in other fields too, the economy risks going down a cul-de-sac. So it's not just higher education that needs attention - Indians need multiple routes to success and prosperity.

With millions of young people coming on to the job market every year - in numbers that dwarf those who are leaving it - India simply can't afford not to offer its people more options in life.