Some months back, but still... FN

In India, Poverty Inspires Technology Workers to Altruism
Namas Bhojani for The International Herald Tribune

Manohar Lakshmipathi works as a painter, but jobs are scarce, so he
registered at Babajob.com, a networking site.

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
Published: October 30, 2007

BANGALORE, India — Manohar Lakshmipathi does not own a computer. In
fact, in India workmen like Mr. Manohar, a house painter, are usually
forbidden to touch clients' computers.

So you can imagine Mr. Manohar's wonder as he sat in a swiveling chair
in front of a computer, dictating his date of birth, phone number and
work history to a secretary. Afterward, a man took his photo. Then,
with a click of a mouse, Mr. Manohar's page popped onto the World Wide
Web, the newest profile on an Indian Web site called Babajob.com.

Babajob seeks to bring the social-networking revolution popularized by
Facebook and MySpace to people who do not even have computers — the
world's poor. And the start-up is just one example of an unanticipated
byproduct of the outsourcing boom: many of the hundreds of
multinationals and hundreds of thousands of technology workers who are
working here are turning their talents to fighting the grinding
poverty that surrounds them.

"In Redmond, you don't see 7-year-olds begging on the street," said
Sean Blagsvedt, Babajob's founder, referring to Microsoft's
headquarters in Washington State, where he once worked. "In India, you
can't escape the feeling that you're really lucky. So you ask, What
are you going to do about all the stuff around you? How are you going
to use all these skills?"

Perhaps for less altruistic reasons, but often with positive results
for the poor, corporations have made India a laboratory for extending
modern technological conveniences to those long deprived. Nokia, for
instance, develops many of its ultralow-cost cellphones here. Citibank
first experimented here with a special A.T.M. that recognizes
thumbprints — to help slum dwellers who struggle with PINs. And
Microsoft has made India one of the major centers of its global
research group studying technologies for the poor, like software that
reads to illiterate computer users. Babajob is a quintessential
example of how the back-office operations in India have spawned
poverty-inspired innovation.

The best-known networking sites in the industry connect computer-savvy
elites to one another. Babajob, by contrast, connects India's elites
to the poor at their doorsteps, people who need jobs but lack the
connections to find them. Job seekers advertise skills, employers
advertise jobs and matches are made through social networks.

For example, if Rajeev and Sanjay are friends, and Sanjay needs a
chauffeur, he can view Rajeev's page, travel to the page of Rajeev's
chauffeur and see which of the chauffeur's friends are looking for
similar work.

Mr. Blagsvedt, now 31, joined Microsoft in Redmond in 1999. Three
years ago he was sent to India to help build the local office of
Microsoft Research, the company's in-house policy research arm. The
new team worked on many of the same complex problems as their peers in
Redmond, but the employees here led very different lives outside the
office than their counterparts in Redmond. They had servants and
laborers. They read constant newspaper tales of undernourishment and
illiteracy.

The company's Indian employees were not seeing poverty for the first
time, but they were now equipped with first-rate computing skills, and
many felt newly empowered to help their society.

At the same time, Microsoft was plagued by widespread software piracy,
which limited its revenue in India. Among other things, the company
looked at low-income consumers as a vast and unexploited commercial
opportunity, so it encouraged its engineers' philanthropic urges.

Poverty became a major focus in Mr. Blagsvedt's research office.
Anthropologists and sociologists were hired to explain things like the
effect of the caste system on rural computer usage. In the course of
that work, Mr. Blagsvedt stumbled upon an insight by a Duke University
economist, Anirudh Krishna.

Mr. Krishna found that many poor Indians in dead-end jobs remain in
poverty not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack
the connections to find them. Any Bangalorean could confirm the
observation: the city teems with laborers desperate for work, and yet
wealthy software tycoons complain endlessly about a shortage of maids
and cooks.

Mr. Blagsvedt's epiphany? "We need village LinkedIn!" he recalled
saying, alluding to the professional networking site.

He quit Microsoft and, with his stepfather, Ira Weise, and a former
Microsoft colleague built a social-networking site to connect
Bangalore's yuppies with its laborers. (The site, which Mr. Blagsvedt
started this summer and runs out of his home, focuses on Bangalore
now, but he plans to spread it to other Indian cities and maybe
globally.)

Building a site meant to reach laborers earning $2 to $3 a day
presented special challenges. The workers would be unfamiliar with
computers. The wealthy potential employers would be reluctant to let
random applicants tend their gardens or their newborns. To deal with
the connectivity problem, Babajob pays anyone, from charities to
Internet cafe owners, who finds job seekers and registers them online.
(Babajob earns its keep from employers' advertisements, diverting a
portion of that to those who register job seekers.) And instead of
creating an anonymous job bazaar, Babajob replicates online the
process by which Indians hire in real life: through chains of personal
connections.

In India, a businessman looking for a chauffeur might ask his friend,
who might ask his chauffeur. Such connections provide a kind of
quality control. The friend's chauffeur, for instance, will not
recommend a hoodlum, for fear of losing his own job.

To re-create this dynamic online, Babajob pays people to be
"connectors" between employer and employee. In the example above, the
businessman's friend and his chauffeur would each earn the equivalent
of $2.50 if they connected the businessman with someone he liked.

The model is gaining attention, and praise. A Bangalore venture
capitalist, when told of Babajob, immediately asked to be put in touch
with Mr. Blagsvedt. And Steve Pogorzelski, president of the
international division of Monster.com, the American jobs site, said,
"Wow" when told of the company. "It is an important innovation because
it opens up the marketplace to people of socioeconomic levels who may
not have the widest array of jobs available to them."

Mr. Krishna, the Duke economist, called it a "very significant
innovation," but he cautioned that the very poor might not belong to
the social networks that would bring them to Babajob, even on the
periphery.

In its first few months, the company has drummed up job seekers on its
own, sending workers into the streets with fliers promising
employment.

To find potential employers, in addition to counting on word of mouth
among those desperate for maids and laborers, Babajob is also relying
on Babalife, the company's parallel social networking site for the
yuppie elite. People listed on Babalife will automatically be on
Babajob, too.

So far, more than 2,000 job seekers have registered. The listings are
a portrait of India's floating underclass, millions and millions
seeking a few dollars a day to work as chauffeurs, nannies, gardeners,
guards and receptionists.

A woman named Selvi Venkatesh was a typical job seeker. "I am really
in need of a job as our residential building collapsed last month in
Ejipura," she said, referring to a building collapse that killed two
people, including an infant, in late July, according to The Times of
India.

In Mr. Blagsvedt's apartment one morning, Mr. Manohar, the painter,
professed hope.

He earns $100 a month. Jobs come irregularly, so he often spends up to
three months of the year idle. Between jobs, he borrows from loan
sharks to feed his wife and children. The usurers levy 10 percent
monthly interest, enough to make a $100 loan a $314 debt in one year.

Mr. Manohar does not want his children to know his worries, or his
life. He wants them to work in a nice office, so he spends nearly half
his income on private schools for them. That is why he was at Babajob
in a swiveling chair, staring at a computer and dreaming of more work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/technology/30poor.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slog\
in&adxnnlx=1219957320-nJv1TpUZV1LQlcvYNehs4Q
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