#
There are two ways to engage with the world.
#
One of them is to engage with the world.
#
There is a real world out there, you try to figure out what it's like.
#
But the other way is to engage with the model of the world in your head.
#
Once you have that model, once you have figured out how to deal with it, the real world doesn't
#
Maybe you are in a profession where you are actually rewarded for engaging with the false
#
model of the world that everyone shares.
#
But hey, the actual world, the real world, it's complex, it's hard work to engage with
#
Better to deal with the simplistic model in your head.
#
Now when I think of this, I think of economists.
#
That's a field I know well and many many economists don't actually care about the real world,
#
but the picture of it in their heads.
#
I often say how 95% of people in any profession are going through the motion-sticking boxes.
#
Economists also accept that they are often incentivized to think in fallacious ways.
#
Bob Dylan once said, if you are not busy being born, you are busy dying.
#
So many of us are busy dying.
#
But not my guest on today's show.
#
She is a young economist who works hard to grapple with the real world because she is
#
a child of the real world.
#
Her parents were factory workers, her mom sold tea at a tea stall for a long time.
#
And to her the importance of theory, of frameworks, lies only in the difference it can make in
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the lives of real people.
#
Now this is the third of three terrific episodes in a row I have done with economists.
#
Richard from last week's episode is a legend of the field and an example and an inspiration
#
Rohit Lamba came on the show two weeks ago and I just love the guy, a fine thinker, curious
#
Soumya Dhanraj is my guest today and she is just special.
#
You'll realize this after you listen to this conversation.
#
The world would be a better place with more Soumyas in it.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Barma.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, my guest today is Soumya Dhanraj, a senior research
#
fellow at Good Business Lab and also an assistant professor of economics at Madras School of
#
I first noticed her work when I came across her papers with her frequent co-author Vidya
#
Mahamre and was struck by the rigor of the work.
#
You will hear more about it in this episode.
#
I bumped into Soumya at a couple of conferences after that and found her refreshingly different
#
from most other economists I meet.
#
She was trained first as an engineer, then she did economics, she loves numbers, she
#
teaches econometrics, but all that academic rigor is rooted in curiosity about the world
#
and empathy with the people who live in it.
#
It drives the work she does.
#
It drives how she does that work.
#
In this conversation, we spoke about her life, the state of education today, how to learn,
#
how we must unlearn before we learn.
#
We spoke about the lives of women in India.
#
We discussed questions of agency and what empowerment means.
#
And we spoke about how good research can change the world.
#
This is one of my favorite conversations on the show.
#
You'll see why when you hear it.
#
But first, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't.
#
It's a plea from me to check out my latest labor of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting
#
with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah.
#
We've called it Everything is Everything.
#
Every week, we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound
#
to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
#
We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
#
Please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at
#
youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
The show is called Everything is Everything.
#
Please do check it out.
#
Swamia, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
Thank you so much, Amit.
#
Thanks for having me here.
#
It feels wonderful to be here after hearing all those episodes of yours.
#
I never thought that I would be one of the persons recording as well.
#
And you know, we've met and hung out at a couple of conferences before this and I always
#
found you incredibly interesting with great insights.
#
But today, I discovered another side of you during lunch, when you told me that story
#
from your childhood, where when you were very young, I don't know, seven years old, eight
#
years old or whatever, you stole your father's scooter and went seven kilometers along the
#
highway to your college and all of that.
#
So which, you know, made me think that, huh, you know, this actually on one level, you
#
know, this whole kind of daredevil persona doesn't sit with a serious economist.
#
But at the same time, you're a serious economist who's also showing initiative and actually
#
you have that bias for action going out there doing things and all of that.
#
So tell me about the scooter incident and what kind of kid were you?
#
I was growing up as a very young child, I was actually very obedient and so on.
#
But I think I changed a lot during my adolescence.
#
In fact, in my father's words, he said that I did a soma salt when I moved to adolescence
#
That's when I started questioning everything around me.
#
Till then, I always took things as such and I never questioned a lot of things in my life.
#
So one of the things my father thought that was it was unsafe for girls to ride on and
#
to ride on scooters, especially in the national highway and so on.
#
So he would never let me take his bike anywhere.
#
So this was not six, seven years old.
#
I was already 15 by then.
#
My listeners know I exaggerate.
#
So and then my father was not there at home and then I thought this is my chance to take
#
And when I rode the bike, I could feel the air on my face and it was so it was so much
#
like freedom, tasting freedom.
#
And of course, I got caught as well after that incident, because when I think the bike
#
got damaged on the one side and my father found out that I had taken the bike.
#
So he asked me, what did I do?
#
And then he was but however, he was more concerned about whether I was hurt or if I met with
#
an accident or something.
#
That's my first taste of freedom, maybe.
#
And actually, you know, just as I know, we'll deep dive into a lot of this later in the
#
But I think of driving a bike and feeling that fresh air on your face as a wonderful
#
metaphor for women experiencing that freedom in a way that you wouldn't immediately think
#
And you must have, you know, I don't know if you experienced other, you know, moments
#
of that air in your face in a metaphorical way, but around you through all the studies
#
that you've done and through all the lives that you've explored, you know, you must have
#
seen many other ways which would not immediately be obvious to someone like me.
#
So, yeah, yeah, I actually, as I said, only after my adolescence, when certain restrictions
#
start coming in a girl's life, that's when I started understanding that I am different
#
from how the way boys are treated at home.
#
Till then, I never felt the differences.
#
And we used to stay in an extended family like my grandfather, cousins.
#
And I just can't count the number of people we had nearby.
#
And then I saw that all my male cousins could go on their own.
#
They can come, they can meet their friends.
#
But, you know, there were so much restrictions on girls not to go outside, not to venture
#
after school. You just have to go to school and come back.
#
You never explored, you know, the way around you, the city you grew up in.
#
And when I started doing that, of course, I had to hide a lot of things from my parents.
#
I had to give all sorts of reasons.
#
You know, I to some extent that even I bunked school to go and sit in a cinema hall with
#
my friends and enjoy watching a cinema.
#
So, you know, these are small things that made me feel like, why should I be not be
#
doing this? And why can you know, my male cousins can do or other male people can do
#
That's when I started seeing the gender differences.
#
And later in life, I started seeing other kind of differences, caste, religion, and
#
so on. And also even language, regional, as I ventured out and out further, I met
#
other people. I could see that I could see a lot more differences and every there was
#
diversity everywhere and how people were embracing this diversity or opposing this
#
diversity and how it starts affecting individual lives.
#
And that's how I think those after I started seeing those things, that's when I felt
#
economics got much more interested.
#
I felt much more interested in economics because I didn't I to start with, I'm an
#
engineer. I went through the usual South Indian way of doing an engineering degree.
#
Then you know that your job is sorted.
#
Then you then you figure out that you don't like engineering and then you explore some
#
other things. And that's how I took this as well.
#
Tell me a bit more about childhood.
#
Like, where did you grow up? What was your home like?
#
What were the early years like in terms of, you know, how you kind of saw yourself?
#
What did you see yourself doing or becoming?
#
Did you know, did you get to read a lot?
#
You know, what was that film for which you bunked school for the first time, which
#
gave you that thrill? But, you know, paint me a picture of what your childhood was like
#
and what you were like as a kid.
#
So I'm born, brought up in Coimbatore.
#
My parents are not very educated.
#
In fact, my father had finished his 10th grade, but my mother did not even complete
#
like maybe 4th or 5th grade.
#
In fact, she was illiterate at this time.
#
She finds it very hard to read and write.
#
But my father can read and write.
#
And he migrated from a village to the Coimbatore city for a job.
#
So this is this typical, the economic model that you have in where people move from
#
agriculture to manufacturing.
#
And now Coimbatore is more service oriented, I feel.
#
So he moved to the city in search of a manufacturing job.
#
And my mother, however, grew up in Coimbatore itself.
#
My mother used to work in a textile mill.
#
My father also was a factory worker here.
#
He worked in manufacturing this textile machinery.
#
That's iron. And Coimbatore is very well known for its industries and specifically
#
by a certain group of people.
#
So later, however, my mother and father could not live with the kind of wages they were
#
receiving as workers. And my mother had to leave her mill job.
#
And then she went to her father and said that, see, I'm not able to even pay rents with
#
what we are earning. So why don't I work with you along with you in the tea stall?
#
So my grandfather had this wayside tea stall that you now see on the road, a very
#
makeshift tea stall on a national highway road.
#
And then that tea stall was on a big ditch, I would say.
#
So on the side of the road, you have a big ditch and then you have this makeshift stall
#
because you know that the highways people can come and anytime remove your stalls.
#
And so that's how my mother started working with my grandfather.
#
And she used to work right from five a.m.
#
in the morning till 10 or 11 in the night.
#
And my father had this factory job.
#
So because of their work, I grew up in my extended family with my aunts.
#
My aunts brought me up.
#
And then, in fact, all the education, school fees and all that, all of them contributed
#
to my education, I would say.
#
So that's why even now I'm so attached to all my extended family.
#
And it's not my mother and father alone.
#
But the good thing is that my parents were my father and my parents were very motivated
#
to to get me into a good school.
#
They thought education can really liberate us.
#
That is something I should really give credit to my parents because they thought education
#
could solve the problems because I can get a better job and I can help my cousins.
#
I can help my entire family to come up.
#
That's what they had in their mind.
#
And they sent me to a good school called the Air Force School.
#
It was very hard for civilians to get inside the school.
#
Some cousin of mine got into the school through him, through some connections.
#
Then I got into the school and I had really good teachers there.
#
This is where I would say that teachers make a big difference in your lives because at
#
home, there is nobody who can help me to teach, who will help me to read and write.
#
Right. And everything I read is because of my teachers.
#
And I owe it a lot to my especially to my primary school teachers, math and English
#
and so on. And then after the but that school only till had the fifth grade and then I
#
moved to a different school, which was also again, it was very helpful in terms of
#
bringing me up, in terms of at least, you know, making me aspire to achieve higher
#
things. And however, those days, the aspirations are very limited to you get the first
#
class in a board, in a board exams or you get the first rank holder, you become a
#
rank holder in your board exams.
#
Right. That was a big thing for us during those days.
#
So that's how the school days, my school days went.
#
Though my parents struggled hard, they never they made sure that I always went to
#
school. I had things that are needed for, you know, for my education.
#
And I had that space to study and then spend time studying.
#
But everything else, I think they restricted in terms of especially during my adolescence,
#
in terms of going out, being with friends, making friends and so on.
#
They thought all this were unnecessary distractions in life.
#
And they thought that it will just take me away from my education and I will not, you
#
know, excel well in my studies.
#
Yeah. And but however, you know, I think I made very good friends.
#
One of them is my husband.
#
So I really started exploring other sides of life.
#
And also, there is another dark side to my childhood.
#
I would say that I lost my younger brother during my when I was around six, seven
#
years old. It was a very big tragedy.
#
I don't know if I can share all the details, but the thing is, he fell into a water
#
tank and in the in the dark evening, his body was lifted out of the water tank.
#
And I was witness to that.
#
I had seen everything in my eyes and I was very small.
#
That incident affected me a lot.
#
So I grew up as a single child, but I had a lot of cousins around me.
#
So that incident affected me a lot.
#
And I started having these nightmares.
#
I started getting started getting fear of everything like I would fear water.
#
I would fear darkness. I would fear everything around.
#
And it took me so many years to come out of that.
#
And I was not able to share that with my parents because I thought in some way
#
they would get affected. And I know that they were struggling in their lives.
#
So I didn't want it to affect them.
#
But then that was a dark part of my childhood.
#
I would say I had gone through some trauma, but I now I use the word trauma.
#
Right. Back then, I didn't even know that there is a this is a trauma that I'm
#
going through and I have to seek help. Right.
#
But in in later years, I understood that even my parents went through
#
trauma after they lost their son.
#
So it was difficult for my father for many years.
#
I think very, very late later in life, my mother shared with me that
#
when my father had this
#
kind of trauma and it took him many years to come out of it as well.
#
So, you know, so the childhood was not, I would say, like a very great thing.
#
We had lots of struggles.
#
And the only thing that was provided
#
and uninterruptedly was focus on your studies, study, study, study,
#
because that's the only thing that they thought that that will lift us up.
#
Yeah. So after I did well in my school, so like I did,
#
I think I got 98 percent in my 12th board.
#
My parents were super happy.
#
I think that's one of the moments that they were very proud of me.
#
And my father thought I should go into engineering.
#
And really, I didn't have I didn't know what to do.
#
What what should I ask for? What my interests were?
#
There was nobody to teach me all these things or even, you know,
#
whom I could look up to and say that I want to be like this person or so.
#
So that so I just took whatever my father suggested for me.
#
And even in engineering, he wouldn't allow me to do mechanical engineering.
#
He said, that's not for girls.
#
So which used to be the case, because I remember in in our college,
#
there were only two girls who were around with 70 guys in the in the class.
#
And this is Bits Pilani. This is in Bits Pilani.
#
Even with Bits Pilani, this was the case.
#
So I did electrical and electric electronics engineering.
#
I ended up in Bits Pilani.
#
So I want to, you know, take a bit of a tangent
#
and double click on a thought that you sparked off, like when you said that
#
there was trauma, but you didn't have the language for it,
#
that, you know, you didn't know that word.
#
And in many cases, I realize and many of my guests have spoken
#
about different aspects of this, that sometimes if you don't have the language
#
to describe something, it becomes very hard to come to terms with it.
#
For example, Ira Pandey in a recent episode spoke about how I think it was her.
#
I hope it was her. My memory is horrible.
#
So apologies if it wasn't.
#
But I think she she made this point that, you know, in a lot of rural places,
#
women won't have language to describe what is happening in their bodies.
#
So now a woman's system is extremely complicated, obviously,
#
but all they can say for a vast variety of ailments is,
#
and then the doctor has to eventually, you know, get the male members
#
out of the room and ask her quietly exactly what is happening.
#
And you don't have the language.
#
And if you don't have the language, sometimes it is difficult
#
to develop the frames that help you understand a particular thing,
#
whether it is your own body or whether it is a world.
#
And then it is sort of difficult to even understand what's going on,
#
again, whether it is with yourself or with the world.
#
And those frames become really important.
#
Like, I think the reason a lot of people are held by therapy, for example,
#
is that it is not that a particular therapist may be really good for them,
#
but that that process gives them a framework through which they can understand
#
something they didn't have the language to think about earlier.
#
And I would imagine that this places you both at an initial disadvantage
#
And the initial disadvantage would be that a lot of things
#
that others can take for granted because they may have the language for it.
#
You're still figuring out you're in the middle of the thing
#
and you don't have words for it and you're still kind of figuring it out.
#
But later on, you know, you your much wider set of experiences
#
might give you more frames and might make the language
#
that then you then come across much more meaningful than for someone
#
who's had a restricted, perhaps elite education.
#
And, you know, they don't even think beyond,
#
you know, the jargon and the cliches.
#
But you've actually committed from the other side.
#
So yeah, I agree completely.
#
Like, for instance, a lot of things when I think about now,
#
when I think about my past now, I feel that the life's experiences
#
And that is why I'm here right now. Right.
#
But the thing is, it could it could have gone other way as well.
#
Like, what if I have never I never managed to come out of my trauma?
#
And it took me till that adolescence years to come out of trauma,
#
to make good friends, friends who could make me happy.
#
And therefore, you know, forget all those things in life
#
and be more brave and bold and courageous.
#
And that's why I said I started even bunking school
#
and trying all sorts of things.
#
But what if I never came out of it?
#
What happens to that child? Right.
#
I always think being an economist and we do.
#
I do some of the things in randomised control trials.
#
You always think about, you know, what if it doesn't?
#
This has not happened. Right.
#
What what would be my path?
#
And when I think of children, that is how I feel like.
#
I don't think people should go through that now. Right.
#
Because now they should be provided support.
#
Mental support is definitely have to be provided.
#
You should understand what a child or trauma is.
#
I understand my parents were not educated.
#
They were they were not even able to recognise that I was going through that.
#
Because they were working all day and they did not even have time for me.
#
I would meet my parents like in a very personal way on a very on an early Sunday morning.
#
That's the only time I used to get to spend time with them and talk to them.
#
So in that limited time, you wouldn't you wouldn't think of sharing your trauma.
#
And most often that time goes by, you know, my father trying to motivate me
#
to pursue to be to be strong, to to go after my goals,
#
to get educated, to liberate myself and my and help my family and so on.
#
So, you know, these things I was not able to share with.
#
But maybe I should have shared with them.
#
I was not able to share with them.
#
So I always think of the child time and think of a child.
#
What if they don't come out of it?
#
Which is a very and I came out of it because I had a good cousins.
#
And that's how I came out of it, I feel.
#
But the language, as you said, is very important.
#
Like, for instance, as you said,
#
this is something I I all I work in one of the factories in Bangalore.
#
These are 16, 17 or 19 year old women working in garment factories.
#
Even now, if they so the factory has this role that if you have menstrual cycle pain,
#
you can actually take rest for some time, two, three hours.
#
And within the factory premises itself, they have a room restroom.
#
So but these women, they don't if there is a male supervisor around,
#
they will never say the word period or menstruation or anything about it.
#
They'll say stomach pain.
#
And then the supervisor is supposed will supposedly understand.
#
And then they'll be like, OK, you take rest. Right.
#
Now, even now, I'm telling you, these words won't are not uttered.
#
People can't ask for help.
#
What exactly is the situation they are facing?
#
It's just it's even sometimes they say that it's just through our eyes.
#
And the way we say the stomach pain, the way we say they will understand
#
that it is menstruation and not general stomach pain stuff. Right.
#
So that is there. That is true.
#
Even now, it's not just in rural areas.
#
I'm talking about people, youngsters in Bangalore. Right.
#
So, you know, we are recording this in the afternoon here.
#
And you taught in the morning at Azeem Premji University.
#
I think you took a cab ride, which you know,
#
you were in Bangalore traffic for two hours.
#
So thank you for making the effort.
#
And straight from here, you're going to go to the railway station
#
and you're going to go to Hoobly for a study.
#
And, you know, at the same time, you know, you've got a husband,
#
you've got two kids, two sons who are nine and five.
#
And it seems to me that you are always on the move and always doing things.
#
Like even before we had a conversation where I could figure this stuff out,
#
you know, just looking at the studies that you've done,
#
whether on your own or with Vidya, you know, you get the
#
sense that you're always out there.
#
And then again, when we were coming into the room, you told me
#
this very unusual thing about your phone, that you left your phone at a tailor.
#
And the next day you went to the tailor again and he gave you the phone
#
and he was surprised because you had never noticed it was gone.
#
And for someone like me, like if my phone is not with me,
#
I will actually know within 30 seconds because all my free time I'm on the phone.
#
And I'm kind of really admiring that that you can have that
#
force of will seems a strong term to use for something so simple,
#
like not looking at your phone.
#
But I think that is kind of what it takes.
#
And do you think that this sort of work ethic constantly
#
keep moving, keep working, you know, is this inherently a part of you
#
anyway, is that the kind of person you are?
#
Or do you think that that was also sort of in the background that,
#
you know, unlike others, you can't afford to rest, that you just have to,
#
you know, give me a sense of this.
#
It comes from my mother.
#
I've seen her struggle day and night, literally like you won't believe.
#
She has, as I said, she was running her T-soil and most of the
#
they don't even have chairs.
#
Most of the times she stands there, right.
#
And so she had varicose veins very early in life.
#
So which means that her walls, they don't function well, right, in the legs.
#
So what happens is that all of a sudden, even if she gets a very small injury
#
on her legs, she will start bleeding and then it won't stop at all.
#
The blood won't stop at all, right.
#
And when she will walk from here 10 feet and it's just blood everywhere.
#
And I've seen this multiple times in during my childhood.
#
And that is something those memories are still very fresh with me.
#
And still after a few days, she will still come back to work and start working
#
because she thought that she cannot afford to sit back and not earn for her family.
#
She wanted, she so badly wanted a house for herself where she says,
#
I can now freely rest in because even after her marriage, she had to stay
#
with her father and then all her sisters and so on.
#
And, you know, it's not a very, you don't feel independent there, right.
#
And you never can own anything in that kind of place.
#
So she wanted to own something, right, own her house.
#
She wanted to have some income of her own.
#
And so she worked very hard for it.
#
In fact, she stopped working because her health turned so worse at around her 50s.
#
I think she worked for really like good 40 years of her life.
#
And by 50, she had lost all her health.
#
And I think that that comes, I've seen them work hard, right.
#
And I feel that, as you said, that it is true.
#
I cannot afford to lose even a day.
#
Even at work, people say that I keep looking at what is next.
#
What should be done and how should we change this?
#
What are the new things that we can think about even before the study goes on field?
#
This is something I keep constantly thinking about and I can't take my mind off it.
#
Some people will even call me work hard.
#
But yeah, I love my work.
#
So like my mother loved her work.
#
She really loved serving food to people, even though she was running a very small
#
tea stall, and she really loved the, you know, she said that when I, even though I
#
got money from my customers, but I always served them with so much love and they
#
would always be very happy to come and have food at our, in our mess, small mess.
#
Later, it became a mess.
#
So she said that this is what I love.
#
And this is nothing else gives me so much satisfaction than serving food to others.
#
You know, she always kept saying, telling us that.
#
So I, in a similar fashion, I feel that I love my work a lot.
#
I love what I'm doing, learning about other people's life through, through economic
#
framework, though economics has given me the framework to look at people's lives.
#
But I, I truly want to understand and bring these stories out, right.
#
And bring these like, for instance, even if it's health or financial inclusion or
#
any other development work that I'm doing, I can so relate to it.
#
I can relate to it from my, from my parents, from what I've seen from my parents,
#
from what I've seen from my other families, from my communities and so on.
#
So that is why I think I can keep going till my motivation lasts or till my
#
interest lasts in this place.
#
So I want to, you know, ask you about something else, which just came to mind
#
when you mentioned how much your mother loved her job, where she wasn't just
#
going through the motions that here, okay, here's a cup of tea or here's your
#
food or whatever, but actually involved in it.
#
And what I've noticed with a lot of people in every profession, including
#
economics, is that many people, they'll get the degree, they'll get the job, but
#
then they're going through the motions.
#
Their heart is not in it.
#
It is like, you know, you, you do what you got to do and you don't really, that
#
intensity goes out after the initial kind of, that kind of thing.
#
And my sense of you from the work you've done and the way you talk about it is
#
that, you know, you are far more involved.
#
You're not going through the motions, you're putting in the thought and you
#
care deeply, but generally when you look around you, I sense that you're an
#
outlier in that sense and that most people I see, including in the economics
#
profession, they, you know, Bob Dylan has this great line, if you're not busy
#
being born, you're busy dying.
#
And I feel that a lot of economists, once that intensity goes where they're
#
constantly thinking and they care passionately, they're busy dying.
#
You know, they're jogging on the spot for 20 years after that.
#
So what is sort of your sense of that?
#
And do you have to make an effort?
#
Do you have to remind yourself that, no, no, I've got to kind of be intense
#
about it or keep thinking about it?
#
Or because I imagine in any profession, especially with the kind of work you do,
#
it must be very tempting to sometimes just go on autopilot and not put in that
#
extra layer of effort or that extra layer of thought.
#
So, you know, is that like, that's something I've struggled with in my past
#
life where often I'll be, I'll just want to coast because, you know, I know my
#
coasting is good enough for whatever it is and I'll just want to coast and then
#
I'll have to remind myself that, no, boss, you know, you just, you've got to,
#
even if no one sees your effort, you have to do the effort.
#
So what is it, what is your mindset towards that?
#
What have you observed around you, you know?
#
I agree, especially this is the case in academia.
#
I've been in academia for almost, I mean, full-time academia.
#
I've been there for almost eight years.
#
And then the last two years I've been working with a research organization.
#
Now I've seen this a lot more in academia because I come from, I have seen it
#
personally, like, you go to, like, you know that, okay, you have to be, you have
#
to complete your PhD and you have to become an assistant professor and after
#
that you need a certain number of publications and then you become an
#
associate and then you become a full professor.
#
And then after that, I've seen a lot of people is they are just, as you said,
#
busy dying because they know that it's now they are already full professors.
#
And then until you retire at 60 or 65, you just have to keep producing those
#
same things, keep up writing those papers.
#
And then, but you don't have that motivation to do something new or learn
#
something new or, you know, do it in a different way, especially in, this is
#
the case again in academia because of, also because that I feel that
#
academicians are very territorial, this is my territory, you know, I've been
#
in this, I've done this for so many years, I have been right from the
#
very first brick that has been put in this place, especially when it comes
#
to their institution, they think that they own it and not be a part of it.
#
So I want to always feel a part of something and not feel like I, I have
#
a right to this kind of a thing.
#
So yeah, this is very true.
#
And for me, like I've first eight years of teaching, it was very enriching.
#
I would, a lot of things I learned is through teaching my students, right.
#
And in fact, I did my PhD because I was sure that I want to be, I want to do
#
teaching, right, and so I immediately after my PhD, I took my, in fact, in
#
between my PhD, I took my teaching job and I love teaching, even now I continue
#
teaching at different places, not just at Madras School of Economics, I've
#
taught in several other places as well.
#
But then as you said, I also hit a kind of saturation point or maybe an
#
inflection point and where I felt that, no, but I want to do something different.
#
I want to learn something different because I know that once I've taught
#
certain subjects over a point of time, just by teaching it, you become a
#
master of it, right, because you've been teaching it for so many years
#
that you, you learn that so well.
#
And the effort progressively becomes lower and lower.
#
And I felt that I was not working hard as before if I have to teach the
#
same subjects and also COVID again was a big thing because I had to move to
#
online teaching and then I really didn't like the online teaching at all because
#
the best part of teaching is being with young people around, right.
#
And they doing all sorts of stuff in the class.
#
Some are so interested.
#
They ask you all sorts of questions.
#
They come up with this very, very new way of thinking about the same model
#
that I've been looking at it for so many years.
#
And another good part is that sometimes they, they just don't care about you.
#
There are a few people who, no matter what you do, they don't, they don't
#
like to, like to be engaged in the class at all, but you have all these
#
different youngsters and then taking them along and making sure that they
#
at least learn the basics of the subject was, is always a challenge.
#
And with every new year comes with new generation and then every year, the
#
way things change is so different.
#
But that all that went away in online teaching, I would say.
#
So at that time I started thinking then that I would, what would I want to do?
#
And then this is when I found a good business lab opportunity.
#
And I thought that, okay, this is, this sounds really great because these
#
people were working in worker wellbeing.
#
And a lot of my job was about also about labor force participation,
#
especially among women and also looking at employment and so on.
#
So, and a good business lab was doing it from the other side.
#
They were looking at it from the firm's angle, how firms have to invest in
#
workers to make their lives better.
#
And why is it also, why can it also be sustainable for firms?
#
So I thought that it would be a very nice, different way to look, look at
#
things and that's when I applied and moved.
#
So I want to keep doing this and keep changing when I think that I have hit
#
the saturation point, I want to try new things.
#
I hope that that fire is in me always.
#
So my, my friend Ajay on, you know, we do this YouTube show called
#
everything is everything.
#
And Ajay said something really interesting, which, you know, had me
#
thinking for a while where he said that, you know, typically people assume
#
that you've got a lifespan of 70, you'll be retired by 60, so you plan for one
#
life, you learn one thing, you get into one career, you rise up the ranks and
#
then you retire and then you die.
#
And his point is that, you know, with lifespans and even health spans, the
#
amount of time you're healthy, changing radically, his contention is we will
#
I'm a little skeptical and not sure I would even want that, but his contention
#
is we will live till 120 and therefore you can plan different lives.
#
You don't have to live one life.
#
You can, you know, devote 20 years to one thing and then move on and do
#
something else and devote 20 years to that.
#
And, and I find that that is truly fascinating to me that, you know, rather
#
than like these days, I think more about that rather than learn X or learn Y,
#
learn a particular thing, I want to sort of learn how to learn.
#
Because then I can just pick up anything new and whatever.
#
Is that also your approach towards learning?
#
Yeah, I, the very first class I tell my students that first let's unlearn
#
everything and then relearn, but you know, the hardest part in life is to unlearn.
#
Unless you're very self-motivated and you have that passion for learning, it's
#
so difficult to unlearn certain things, especially the things that you're used
#
to from your childhood, right?
#
Like sometimes it might be the fear of something.
#
Sometimes it might be, you know, let's say like, for instance, now I'm,
#
I'm thinking of swimming.
#
I've been, I've been fearing water for so, for so many days that I've never,
#
I never picked up swimming.
#
Finally, I got myself to learn swimming now.
#
So that unlearning is a very, is an important part of life.
#
And I, that means that you have to let your own self like say that, okay,
#
whatever you learn is fine, but let's completely forget that and think of this
#
as we are starting afresh, we are starting on a new slate, you know, that is,
#
I, I think is a very difficult thing.
#
And it's also an important skill that you develop over time that, because again,
#
this is, again, this is one of the drawbacks of being in academy, I felt is
#
that, you know, making people look at doing things in a different way, making
#
them to do things in a different way.
#
Like, why do you have the same old rules that you had 30 years back?
#
Why does, why do you have to use the same, same old question papers?
#
Why do you have to use the same old exam patterns?
#
So sometimes a lot of institutions in India, a lot, I'm not talking about
#
every, everybody, but a lot of institutions in India have this set pattern.
#
You need a 20% internal, 20%, another internal, 40% this and that, and that
#
question paper has to be of this pattern every day.
#
I mean, how many universities, think about all state universities, they have
#
this set pattern of question papers and that cuts across all subjects, which
#
is like, which sounds very weird to me.
#
And why is academia should be, always be at the forefront of innovation.
#
It should not be the last one to change things, right?
#
But in Indian Academy, I, I find in many places that they're always the last
#
person, last people, because again, I feel it's because of the old-timers
#
who think, who have been in the same place for many years, and then they
#
do not want things to change.
#
They do not want to innovate.
#
They do not want to innovate in the way they recruit people in whom they want
#
to recruit, do they want to think interdisciplinary, in the way they recruit
#
students, in the way they set exams for students, in the way they, the students
#
find jobs, so again, it's the same campus placements, which you, which I did like
#
20 years back, why should you be doing the same thing?
#
Like you call companies to the institutions, they offer you the standard
#
data analyst jobs, and then people are all scrambling to get that job.
#
There's so much pressure during those things.
#
And then they all end up coming back after a few years and telling me,
#
ma'am, ma'am, but this is not what I wanted to do, right?
#
So I feel like that's where I feel Indian Academy has to really change a lot.
#
And I've seen it from inside.
#
Now I see it from, I can tell it from an outsider perspective that
#
unless you move to different things and you start experimenting, you will not be,
#
you will always be resistant to experiment that in your institution as well.
#
You don't want to change.
#
If things are going fine, why should I change?
#
My students are getting a hundred percent placement.
#
But I always tell them that, you know, but your students are all
#
becoming corporate data analysts.
#
Why don't you want your students to go into diverse things?
#
Why are they not writers?
#
Why are they not becoming economists?
#
Why are they not going into policy circle?
#
Why are they not writing in newspapers?
#
For instance, all of them end up as becoming data analysts for some AI jobs, right?
#
So I said, this is not what we have to think.
#
What is the next thing?
#
And what do you want to innovate in that?
#
But there is always resistance.
#
It's very hard, I'm telling you.
#
And it's worse when you go to state universities and local colleges.
#
I see my cousins struggling.
#
They are all doing their PhDs in physics, agriculture, chemistry,
#
and all of them, the kind of things I hear about how their university treats them,
#
how they, what are the things that they have to do to get a PhD.
#
They spend, I would say more than 50% of their time in going through
#
these admin related work rather than actually focusing on their thesis.
#
This is the worst part, right?
#
Because we have set up systems like that.
#
And this is where I felt that, that, you know, I shouldn't be like, I
#
shouldn't become an old timer like that.
#
And think that I have done so much to this institution that now the
#
institution owes me something back.
#
I've heard this enough a lot before, and I do not want to be one such person.
#
There's this lovely story.
#
I think I heard it from Yogan Goyal about Albert Einstein and Albert
#
Einstein was once teaching.
#
So in the first semester, he gave his students a bunch of questions.
#
And the next semester, he gave those students the same bunch of questions.
#
So his teaching assistant asked him that, what is the matter?
#
You know, it's the same students, the questions are the same.
#
He's saying, yes, but the answers have changed.
#
And I love that anecdote because at one level, of course, it tells you about
#
the exciting times that he's living in when so much science is changing.
#
But it also tells me of that sort of, one, you're actively thinking about
#
what you're doing and why, and two, there is that openness to change.
#
Now, again, going back to Ajay and I, we did an episode of everything is
#
everything called fixing the knowledge society.
#
And I know this is also one of his pet peeves that academia is so broken.
#
And since you've been both on the inside and now you're on the outside
#
and looking at it that way, I want to, I want to ask you to double click
#
if you can on what are the structural reasons it is broken?
#
You know, like as an economist, you understand design, you understand
#
incentives, like one sort of thought experiment I often have is supposing
#
you reboot the universe, right?
#
You reboot civilization rather, if you reboot the universe, humans may not come.
#
But if you reboot civilization, what does X look like?
#
And one question could be, what does education look like?
#
Because it is not necessary that it would evolve to be exactly
#
the thing that it is now.
#
And I think about counterfactuals, like how differently could it evolve?
#
So my question there is that, you know, within the system, what are the
#
kind of incentives in place which make it so horrible, which make it so
#
moribund and bound to convention and always a last to change and so
#
political, even within the institutions?
#
What are those incentives in play and what is an alternative design
#
which would be sustainable where the incentives are good, where, you
#
know, good things happen, where students are nurtured and actually
#
taught and, you know, old timers don't act as gatekeepers.
#
So what are the sort of...
#
It starts from funding, right?
#
It's how money is tied to everything.
#
So it's like, okay, if the government comes and says that I give you this
#
much money, if the government says that, okay, I give you a hundred
#
crores money, but you're only passing out 30 students in a year, what kind
#
of, how much money is going into the drain?
#
Why can't you just add 200 more to your degrees?
#
So the first, in most government funded institutions, the logic, that's
#
where the logic itself goes, because you cannot measure by, okay,
#
a hundred crores means this much, these many PhDs or these many
#
BA programs or, and so on.
#
Because you need to evaluate a truly like, what is the quality of
#
research happening there?
#
What is the quality of students coming?
#
Where are the students going into?
#
I don't think people are looking into that matrix.
#
It's always a number of, even now, when we talk about IITs and IMs,
#
you see in the papers, right?
#
They're always about IITs, new IITs have come now, this many more people
#
will get into IITs and so on.
#
So it's always the problem of solving like quantity, right?
#
You solve the quantity, then you're done.
#
But beyond quantity, we have not started developing proper metrics.
#
Like how many students have enrolled from you?
#
How many students got placed?
#
You look at even the statistics that the government collects
#
to, for these ranking, right?
#
It's always about what, how many ended up in jobs?
#
What percentage of placements and what is the average salary package?
#
Like is, is, do you have a four credit course which is conducted for 60 hours?
#
You know, always in quantity numbers only, but we are not looking at what
#
exactly, what exactly is the research produced there and what the students
#
end up becoming as well, which is more important, right?
#
So that's a lot of this is related to funding.
#
Another thing is related to all these processes of even both
#
faculty as well as students' recruitment.
#
Faculty, the moment you look at faculty recruitment, you, so you, if you're
#
running, if you're in economics, you will ask them how many top journals do you
#
have or how many conferences you've been to, how many of these things you've done.
#
Which is still, which is still okay.
#
But then there are also other things that you should be willing to experiment.
#
Like, do you want to have a, like, for instance, do you want to have a math
#
person, also a math professor in one of your econ department?
#
Do you want to think interdisciplinary?
#
Do you want to see how you want to collaborate?
#
Do you want to see that, you know, it's not just the number of research papers,
#
but like also like how many actually are you able to collaborate with different
#
with industries, for instance, now I'm working with industries.
#
Now I understand how much important it is to for research with industries, how
#
you are able to collaborate with industries, right?
#
And actually make some, make some things that are useful for industries or
#
useful for people who are actually in the society, right?
#
And then, then you also have even a faculty recruitment.
#
It's like very standard.
#
You, you need recommendation letters in academia for everything, right?
#
And then the recommendation means networks, right?
#
Finally, it will boil down to you how many people you know, whom you know, right?
#
Whether they will write a letter for you and so on.
#
I feel that that system is like, is just getting saturated now.
#
So it's like, I keep telling that I know this person, this person knows me.
#
And so therefore I can get into even faculty recruitment.
#
A lot of places in academia, like from one IIT to another IIT or from one
#
IIM to another IIM, you recruit my student there, I recruit your student here.
#
It's always a give and take kind of a policy.
#
A lot goes on like this in academia.
#
I'm sure that academicians hearing this talk will be really very irritated.
#
It really happens in academia.
#
So this, this kind of system of recruitment is very flawed in the first place.
#
Then the students recruitment, they all, you all have to write entrance examination.
#
Everything has now become objectives.
#
The, the, the way to solve any kind of complex questions is give them objectives.
#
A, B, C, D, pick multiple choice.
#
I mean, it's fine, but then there are other qualities that you
#
need to be an economist, right?
#
You cannot just solve some numbers and then say that is the right answer.
#
And then therefore I become a great economist.
#
People should learn to know to write an essay.
#
How many students, you know, know to write a proper essay on a
#
topic that they are interested in.
#
We are not bothered about that at all.
#
I'm telling you every, every, most institutes want to show what they're,
#
uh, where the students are going to and what kind of package they get.
#
What do you see in newspapers about IITs and IIM?
#
Mostly year on year, you hear about I am a student having this two
#
crore package and getting placed in somewhere else, right?
#
And we, are we actually, are we, we are not evaluating, even for IMS,
#
we are not evaluating them on how many are able to start their own,
#
start their own organizations, their own, uh, you know, come up with these startups.
#
What is the innovation culture there?
#
These are the things that we don't think about at all.
#
And it is all because of how money is finally given to the Institute.
#
I give money to you to produce this many people, then that's,
#
if that's your job, I'm done.
#
And the next thing is, is the promotions, right?
#
As I told you that once I'm a full professor, what is my incentive
#
to do anything later on?
#
There are people who have, uh, who continue to be motivated and they
#
continue their journey towards research that they, they keep pursuing this.
#
But after that, but system in system, also, you should have some checks
#
and balances so that you keep, you are able to motivate people to continually
#
explore something, right?
#
And having attained a full professor, you should all the more be doing these
#
things because you know that you don't have to go after any promotions right now.
#
You don't have to prove anything to anybody.
#
And so you're even more freer to pursue your own research, but then the
#
incentives and the checks and balances stop there that you don't have to do
#
anything further to, uh, you know, to show anybody that's why you live this one
#
monotonous life and you, you just wait for your retirement and finish, right?
#
So all every, every part in right from funding to administrative processes in,
#
in terms of recruitment of students, as well as faculty in terms of their
#
promotion, all these things really need a lot more thinking through, right?
#
Which new institutions might be exploring, but then it gets very costly.
#
But then what I feel is public institutions should be exploring these things
#
because I come from a background where public institutions have helped me
#
to nurture and go till my PhD, right?
#
If, if it were not for an IGADR that helped that gave me a very subsidized
#
education and gave me a stipend, I would not have done a PhD if it was not for
#
IIT Madras, which gave me again a very subsidized education and gave me a
#
stipend to pursue, I would not have done my masters.
#
So if public institutions are not doing this and we rely on some private
#
institutions bringing up here and there to solve these kinds of issues, that's
#
not going to solve the society's problems.
#
I think the government should be more proactive in doing how it wants to put
#
its funding, where it wants to fund, how, how does it want to spur innovation,
#
both in industry as well as in academia, how to bring more academia industry
#
I feel there is, we have a very big gap there.
#
One of the values we both share is, you know, the importance we give to that
#
phrase you used a couple of times, interdisciplinary, that you need to
#
think in interdisciplinary way, look at the world with multiple frames.
#
And what happens in academia too often is that you get into silos and then
#
you're rewarded for thinking in silos, for getting hyper specialized and so on.
#
I want to kind of understand your personal journey towards becoming an
#
interdisciplinary person, like how did you gain the different kinds of frames
#
to sort of, to look at the world in that broad way, especially since you went to
#
like engineering college, you know, first Bits Pilani and then your masters in
#
IIT, you know, tell me about that time, like what was going on in your head?
#
Like what were you interested in?
#
What were you learning?
#
You know, what were the sort of the seminal moments in your thinking, you know,
#
like how did the frames through which you looked at the world, how did they evolve?
#
Give me a sense of that journey of yours.
#
So I started reading very late in my life.
#
I remember the very first book, actually like book outside my education that I
#
read was when my friend gave me this book for my summer holidays.
#
And he told me that he was, he was really into these mysteries and thriller books.
#
So he gave me one of one such thriller.
#
I think it's tell no one.
#
If he gave me a thriller and said, why don't you read?
#
This is very interesting.
#
And, and that was, I was already 16 by then.
#
Now I think of my son, he's a younger son, he's five years old and he's
#
already reading books, right?
#
And I wish I had that privilege in life, but yeah, and I started with all those
#
thriller and fiction and those things, right?
#
But, but once I moved to bits, bits planning, that's when I
#
started reading newspapers.
#
And somehow I felt I started getting fascinated by the business and
#
economic sections of the newspapers.
#
The best part of being in the university is the library, right?
#
And then also these endless access to, and we always kept fighting to increase
#
the number of hours in the library, right?
#
The library is open and so there's endless access to all these newspapers,
#
magazines, journals, books, you know, all kinds of books.
#
So that is where I, when I started exploring and because even to buy
#
newspapers, it was not affordable those days.
#
So, and the business and economic section started interesting me.
#
And I used to voraciously read them, understand, try to understand these
#
terms and I would go and search for these terms, what these terms mean, like
#
what is GDP mean, what is, what is the stock market, what do people do, what
#
do investors do in stock market and so on.
#
So when I started reading a lot about this, but I, so I thought that maybe
#
then for me, I got very interested in finance and economics, so I thought
#
maybe I should, then people suggested then you should do a, write a CAT exam.
#
And then do an MBA is what people suggested.
#
I did write my CAT exam and I was doing my one semester of internship
#
At that time we were looking at, back in 2008, we were looking at electric
#
vehicles, battery management system, lithium ion battery management system.
#
I was in, in Mercedes-Benz.
#
So they were so advanced even then.
#
So, and I had another intern there in Mercedes-Benz and he said that,
#
okay, if you're so interested in finance and it's, MBA is not your way because
#
MBA teaches different things at a more superficial level, if you want to
#
really dive into it, there's one course like this in masters in, masters in
#
finance in IIT Madras, where you will only deep dive into finance and you
#
can even do research in finance.
#
I got so fascinated by that and I applied to that program and I got
#
When I learned finance, I understood that everything is, I mean, finance
#
is just one part of economics and economics is much bigger than finance.
#
And I started taking interdisciplinary, this is where, you know, I came from
#
engineering, I was, I, I was just purely motivated by my interest to learn
#
finance and people were like, how, but how did you just directly jump into
#
masters in research in finance?
#
You don't even know accounting for, to start with, you don't even know what
#
is a balance sheet to start with.
#
So, but I, that interest helped me on, and then I started learning finance,
#
but I learned, I understood that if I want to understand finance better,
#
economics is even, economic theory is so important, understanding micro
#
economics, because risk, you know, preferences, all these things come
#
from economic modeling, right?
#
So that's when I started picking up economics.
#
So I was there in management department, but I used to take courses from the
#
humanities department, right?
#
And even then I started exploring, and then I learned that I find economics
#
more interesting, then I started, jumped to economics in my PhD.
#
So the thing is that, but the math before, before I came to finance, I had
#
already built my math foundation very strongly through my engineering, right?
#
I had seven semesters of mathematics in my business learning.
#
I'm very grateful for that.
#
It strongly built my foundation so that I could pursue a lot on my own.
#
And that's what I think university should do.
#
Finally, it should equip you to, equip you such that you can pursue whatever
#
you want to do in your life, learn everything, whatever you want in life.
#
Even today, I tell students that, see, I can only show you a path, but you
#
only have to take the path and that path is self-study, you know, nothing comes
#
to you as much as, you know, how much ever I try to teach you, self-study is
#
where you gain the most, that's where you will learn the most.
#
So you can always look at me to, to show, to ask me to show where this way is,
#
how to take this path, that is something I can always do for you, but ultimately
#
you have to walk the path, right?
#
Nobody can else, nobody else can walk for you.
#
How much ever I do in your, in my lectures, finally, you need to pick up a
#
book and pick up textbooks and learn on your own, learn what, what the
#
textbooks are trying to say.
#
Pick up multiple textbooks from the same, whichever subject interests you.
#
Pick up multiple textbooks.
#
Look at how different authors say about the same concept.
#
Then you will look at different angles of what the same concept, right?
#
And this is where I think my interdisciplinary approach came because the
#
same probability and statistics is taught in a different way in engineering.
#
It's taught in a different way in economics.
#
It's taught in a very different way, you know, in different subjects.
#
Biologists learn it in a little different way.
#
It's because it has different applications in different streams.
#
So you can teach the same concept in different ways, depending upon the
#
applications you want them to, you know, acquire.
#
So that helped me a lot.
#
I feel that having that interdisciplinary background helped me a lot.
#
And I was not afraid to pick up something new and do learn.
#
Even though I did, I never said that, like, I can never say that I, I
#
did everything very greatly, but then I was happy because I could, I
#
could try something on my own and I have nobody to point it.
#
So see this, my teacher was bad and that's why I didn't study.
#
I had nobody to point it.
#
I said that I tried, I did not get it.
#
It's not my, it's not, it's not for me.
#
I'll pick up something else, right.
#
I kept trying that's, which is the best part I felt.
#
And that's when I was also, it also helped me to learn how to teach because
#
I could pick up things from different subjects, different books, the
#
same concept in different books.
#
So I remember I teach econometrics.
#
I love econometrics, teaching econometrics.
#
I, for learning econometrics, I remember I learned four books, four
#
textbooks simultaneously.
#
So each textbook had a different approach to the same thing, right.
#
If you take a Gujarati textbook, it'll approach it in a different way.
#
Like, Woolridge will approach it in a different way.
#
A Greenwood would approach it in a different way.
#
But then learning from different ways gave me the perspective of,
#
okay, what the concept is, right.
#
Now, and I tell myself then mathematics is just a tool to, to understand this
#
But then as long as you understand the concept, whether you are, I tell
#
students, whether you are able to write it in English or you are able to prove
#
it as in mathematically, there are different ways you can arrive at the same
#
thing and choose your way, whichever way you are able to understand and get it.
#
So this, this is where I felt I could also develop that attitude towards teaching.
#
But finally, everything is constrained by the environment you operate in.
#
Like it will come down to the university's rules, what you have to do,
#
what exams you have to set, what, what grades you have to give.
#
Everything is constrained by the rules that you are operating in.
#
You know, so I'm, I'm probably the only person you've met, almost certainly the
#
only person you met who's actually learned something while live on camera.
#
So I was recording this episode on the beauty of finance with Ajay.
#
And it's a lovely episode.
#
It's one of my favorite episodes because I don't know much talking in it, but it's
#
one of my favorite episodes because I was learning stuff with the camera on me.
#
So you can actually see me on YouTube, perhaps even with that glue of understanding
#
on my face, because he went through the evolution of finance in such a way that
#
a lot of fundamental questions, which I never asked, I suddenly realized like,
#
why does the stock market exist?
#
What is a joint stock company?
#
Why do you need a joint stock company, et cetera, et cetera, all those
#
And when you were telling me about your process of learning finance and
#
engineering college, you know, you mentioned that one of the questions you
#
asked was what is a stock market?
#
And I love that question.
#
That is a beautiful question because all my life I never asked myself that
#
question because I assume that you have a vague impressionistic idea, oh, this
#
is stock market, this is that, this is that, and you don't delve into the why,
#
and you don't delve into the first principles and therefore you don't really
#
know it, you think you know it, you think you have a handle, you don't really know
#
it, and I think about 95% of things I think I know, I actually don't know,
#
you know, even much more than that, 99.9%, which is probably the case with everyone.
#
And in that sense, I'm thinking aloud that on the one hand, yeah, you're right,
#
that if you start reading late in life, it can look like a bug because you don't
#
have that universal knowledge with others have just through easy osmosis
#
they've got, but it is also a feature because it teaches you to ask those
#
fundamental questions because you can take nothing for granted.
#
You are asking what is the stock market and then you are going deeper.
#
And, and I would imagine that then one, you take that approach into everything,
#
which is an incredible way to learn.
#
And in any case, learning to teach is also, you know, the best kind of learning.
#
And two, I imagine that then you take it into your teaching where you are not just
#
following the narrative of a textbook, but you are then teaching everyone to think
#
in a way as if they have never read a book in their life either.
#
And, you know, and I think that's kind of wonderful.
#
So what, what are your sort of thoughts about this?
#
Because I'm just thinking aloud, listening to you.
#
And I'm thinking that, yeah, this is wonderful.
#
But there's one more added element to it, right?
#
Like you need conviction.
#
So that conviction that you have to be like, that conviction is important because
#
it will help you to persevere because I remember my first econometrics
#
exam, I did so badly, badly.
#
So, but you still have to continue, you understand that, I mean, when I say badly
#
compared to the rest of my class, because they already have done econometrics, they
#
have gone through the training and so on.
#
So, and I do it at 26 or 27 years of my age.
#
That's the first time I see what is econometrics, right?
#
So that conviction is important.
#
I feel otherwise it's very difficult to make yourself, to keep yourself motivated.
#
And see, it's one semester goes like this, right?
#
So how much can, how much do you want to wait and pursue, still pursue it very hard,
#
So at one point, if you don't have the conviction, the short-term thinking will
#
take over and then they say that, let's forget this, let me see how to pass my
#
exam and do it, which is what I see in a lot of students these days as well, right?
#
When I see them that they always want this quick tricks, okay, forget all these
#
things, forget, I don't want these proofs and not tell me what should I do to pass
#
this exam? They don't say it in so many words, but then that's what they mean,
#
Like what should I focus on?
#
I can't tell you what you focus on to learn econometrics, right?
#
And I said that, you know, forget your exams and try to think about econometrics,
#
but how many students can you motivate like that?
#
You know, that's one thing, but I completely agree when you have that
#
conviction and you are willing to experiment, right?
#
And you're willing to experiment in the way you teach, the way you learn the
#
different kinds of textbooks that you want to experiment.
#
I try to pick up different, different textbooks to understand the same thing
#
over and over again, right?
#
Everybody has a thought process of arriving to it.
#
So that thought process is very important, right?
#
It's not the final derivation whether you're able to do it, but what is the
#
thought process that went into, into doing it in a particular way and finding the
#
way to arrive at a conclusion.
#
That is very important.
#
And that comes by taking books.
#
I tell students again and again, don't read from Wikipedia, don't read from
#
solution manuals, read from textbooks, read all the explanation, try to see how
#
they are trying to illustrate the same thing with different examples, then you
#
will understand what is the thought process behind this concept.
#
So I totally agree with you, but I say that you need a lot of willpower and
#
Where did your conviction come from?
#
Because it would be so easy for you to fall for the imposter syndrome and say,
#
no, I can't do it because of X reason or Y reason, but you know, how did that
#
Did you always have that conviction or was it that there was something you set
#
your mind to early and it happened?
#
You managed it and that gave you conviction and set a virtuous cycle in
#
process or how did it work?
#
So as I told you that, see, I was able to pick up education even without any
#
support at home because my teachers were good, right?
#
And I understood the value of teachers can be to the society.
#
Imagine a teacher comes to you, you are nowhere in this world, you are nobody
#
in this world, you don't know English, you don't know anything, your background
#
cannot support you to learn anything.
#
I didn't even have books at my home, right?
#
Nobody bought me any story.
#
They never, my parents didn't even know that, you know, you have to give books
#
to your children to, to make them better in language and other things.
#
So I didn't have any of these, but then it was only, I would say all the education
#
that I, so the aspiration of my parents and then the, the, the amount of effort
#
in the teachers, my primary school teachers put in, put into it.
#
And also some of the later in the university as well, I met some brilliant
#
teachers, so even though I had nothing to do with that subject, so for instance,
#
in my, even in my engineering, I used to take, I had this very good physics
#
teacher that I used to go and learn.
#
I picked up general theory of relativity as my elective, right?
#
Because I loved the teacher so much.
#
And I knew that if I go and sit in his class, just by sitting in his class, I
#
will learn general theory of relativity, right?
#
So there are these teachers who can do wonders to you.
#
And I, I thought that if I have to be an academician, I have to be that teacher
#
who can instill that learning interest in you rather than saying that this is what
#
it is and this is what comes for your exam.
#
And so if you do this, you will be able to get this grade, right?
#
So I was very sure that because the teachers had put that effort in me, if the
#
teacher, if I had not had good teachers in, in my, in the early stages of my life,
#
I don't think I would have pursued academia in this manner.
#
I don't even know if I would have been an academician, if not for very good
#
teachers in my life, I, a lot of them from primary school till my university
#
grades, they were always good teachers who helped students, who made sure that
#
they learned something and they pursue their interests, they pushed them a
#
little bit so that they pushed their boundaries so that they can go and
#
become something right.
#
And that I feel I really owe to my teachers a lot.
#
Do you remember any particular teacher or particular instance or something that,
#
So for English, I would say even the English that I can speak now, it's not
#
very great English, but still like I had a very good English teacher, Susan Thomas.
#
She taught, she taught me really good grammar.
#
Had I read more books at that stage of my life, I, I knew that I would have been
#
able to speak even better than this.
#
And then my math teachers, right.
#
Especially my math teacher in school, like Mr.
#
I don't even know where these people are, but, and then in university, my
#
macro teacher, Professor Navin Srinivasan, though I never ended up pursuing
#
macroeconomics, that I knew that I'm not going to be a macroeconomist, but I would
#
always sit in the first row, first just right in front of his eyes so that I
#
don't miss any word that he utters.
#
So a lot of good, and also in my engineering days, I have a lot of good
#
physics teachers, Professor Arun Kulkarni.
#
And then in, I had very good math teachers in my engineering days.
#
In fact, one of them, he could not even speak very good English, but I know
#
his math was just flawless, right.
#
So these are the teachers I really owe and there are many more, definitely.
#
And there are teachers who, who have met, who have met in other parts of life,
#
like not as teachers, but they have taught me different things.
#
Like for instance, I would say, Professor Chandrasekhar and
#
Professor Sripad Motiram, they said that they, they helped me to run a marathon.
#
They taught me how, how you can participate in a marathon, right.
#
And that is something I developed as an interest in my life that I still have it
#
as my goal, that I will run marathons every year, and I want to do it as long
#
as I can, so teachers can really do wonders.
#
I totally, I totally believe in that, not because I've been a teacher myself,
#
but because how teachers have influenced my life throughout.
#
That's where I developed that this is what I want to be in
#
Academy, if I want to be.
#
There is a common trope in India that because teachers are so lowly paid,
#
you're never going to get good teachers.
#
You're going to get a lot of absenteeism in primary education and in higher
#
education, you're going to get, you know, mediocre people who are going through
#
the motions and all of that.
#
And that's not exactly true, you know, as in the many of the examples you've taken.
#
And it strikes me that there are two ways to think about it, that a typical,
#
very layer one way of economic thinking would be that incentives matter.
#
Teachers are so badly paid, so you'll have bad people come to economics
#
and they won't really care about teaching rather, and they won't really care.
#
But there's another layer that the incentives we are responding to are not
#
just monetary incentives, that sometimes you're driven by a sense of purpose.
#
Sometimes that the joy that you get from seeing someone learn from seeing that
#
spark of recognition can be priceless.
#
And so how does one look at this?
#
Like are all the teachers that you've named just outliers and you were lucky to
#
come across them or is there more of that happening where people do things out of
#
purpose? Everything is not like on the one hand, the picture you've painted of a
#
lot of these students or whatever is that it is goal oriented that, oh, I, you know,
#
I want to do my engineering so I can be a data entry operator and then I can be an
#
IT and then I can be whatever and then I'll be vice president at 45 and etc, etc.
#
And it's all goal oriented and it's banal and there's no higher sort of purpose or
#
motive happening there. But equally in your story, I find within these teachers and
#
perhaps you yourself that there is this sense of purpose that it is not just about
#
career, but there is a sense of purpose.
#
So how do you look at this? Like what are, you know, obviously the selection effect
#
would mean you remember the people who have this purpose because they are the ones
#
who will inevitably make a mark.
#
But what do you sort of think about this?
#
And do you think that there is, do you think it is inevitable that a small
#
percentage of people may have purpose, but most people won't, they'll just be goal
#
oriented? Or do you feel it is not inevitable that it is a social equilibrium
#
that it happens to be like that right now?
#
But maybe it can change.
#
Like, have you found that you're able to inspire people who were, you know,
#
students who were perhaps not thinking in bigger terms, but changed the way they
#
look at the world because of you?
#
Yeah, teaching can be like it need not be completely monetary or this thing.
#
I've seen a lot of teachers who really have derived that sense of satisfaction by
#
imparting knowledge to others, right?
#
And that's I feel is a very great thing to do, to make to make oneself self aware,
#
to make oneself, you know, learn something, to make others learn something is very
#
important because they then get to see the world in a different perspective.
#
They want they would then maybe go on to do something different in their lives and
#
so on. But the thing is, we cannot discount the monetary part completely because you
#
need to see you need a certain level of definitely a certain level of pay to
#
attract talent into the talent into academia.
#
But then I think that also equally important is the is the way institutions
#
are right, which I talked about trade.
#
What kind of other things that you put in place, you have to make sure the
#
environment is enriching the students that that you have are able to attract are
#
really the ones who are interested in this and want to learn something and not
#
because their father sent them to, you know, do some stuff and then therefore you
#
cannot motivate such a person unless he or she has their own realization that,
#
OK, I'm going to I want to be this and I want to learn this.
#
Right. So that that comes only when you have inbuilt structures, systems in place
#
in academia to to keep the talent right.
#
See, not finally, not everybody wants to be like earning crores in academia.
#
People know that academia is not if you want to earn a lot, you you can always go to
#
other jobs. There are jobs that pay you more.
#
But people come to academia because of all the other things that the learning
#
environment, the ability to continue to research and then the ability to talk with
#
different kinds of people, especially the younger generation, the students who are
#
from different backgrounds and who who teach you a lot more things and also people
#
who want to keep keep their journey, a journey of learning alive throughout their
#
life. Right. It can attract.
#
But if you have that proper systems in place, right, an institution should foster
#
that it should attract the talent in such a way that it's it's it's just not
#
monetary rewards. But there are also other non-monetary rewards like just a recognition,
#
just the way I'm happy doing research itself.
#
Right. Like for just for the sake of research.
#
Like when I talk to when I talk to workers, when I talk to firm management, the things
#
I learn from them. Right.
#
I'm happy that I'm able to as a researcher, I'm able to get their time to understand
#
And that is so enriching for me.
#
I don't have to be given like crores of money to do this because I know that ultimately
#
I am it's it's more than that I derive from this job.
#
Right. And that is very important.
#
And I don't know, like if institutions in India, a lot of institutions in India are
#
capable of doing that and they don't know value, put values on that so much.
#
Right. These kind of non-monetary things.
#
And how do you make sure that the system is always there to reward people who want to
#
pursue these kind of things?
#
Right. That is is very, very lagging in Indian academies.
#
I really wish there are a lot more things that we do.
#
We change in our academia.
#
So given the large number of, you know, youngsters that we have, given the demographic
#
dividend that everybody is talking about.
#
But then you see the ACER report.
#
It's just unbelievable.
#
And it just you just can't digest that.
#
Right. I always think if my if my teacher hadn't given me this kind of learning, what
#
Right. What would have happened to me?
#
Right. And and it's so sad that so many so much of our, you know, children's as well
#
as cognitive achievements are all lost because we don't have proper systems in place.
#
I mean, the ACER reports have been horrendous for 20 years, ever since it started coming
#
Yeah. And that's the unseen.
#
Right. No one sees like I'm sitting with you right now, Somia, but there are a thousand
#
Somia's who never made it.
#
So it's it's heartbreaking.
#
I did this great episode with Sapna Little, where she spoke about where she written a
#
book on Delhi, you know, in the last days of the Mughal Sultanate, where the East India
#
Company was running it in the first half of the 19th century.
#
And she spoke about Saeed Ahmad Khan and Saeed Ahmad Khan, of course, later founded the
#
Aligarh Muslim University and all that great educationist.
#
But how he educated himself was that he had this informal kind of whatever education thing
#
there was really was 19.
#
Then he went out in the world.
#
And then at the age of 30, he decided that I want to learn new things.
#
And he figured out, I think, six subjects, if I remember correctly.
#
And he got six private tutors who would then teach him.
#
And of course, he had the privilege and all that to hire the private tutors and whatever.
#
And today you could argue that those six private tutors are, you know, six million private
#
tutors waiting on the Internet for us to learn and all of that.
#
So I want to ask a couple of two part question.
#
And part one is that how much of your learning has really happened outside the system of
#
academia, outside the sort of the rails that were laid down by the syllabus and the course
#
And that do you think that we should think seriously about that kind of, you know, outside
#
the university, outside of academia learning and how we can solve learning problems perhaps
#
with private enterprise and not have to and different disruptive solutions and not think
#
within the confines of the paradigm already laid down by the existing education system.
#
You know, if somebody manages to reform it, great.
#
But chances are it will continue going down the moribund way that it is with a few honorable
#
exceptions like yourself, you know, trying their best.
#
But ultimately, the system is what it is.
#
It's a lumbering beast.
#
So, yeah, so those two that one, how much of your learning has actually come outside
#
And two, thinking of that and thinking of the technology that we see around us, that
#
do you think that that is something that gives you a little bit of hope in, you know, where
#
people like Saeed Ahmad Khan can go out there and educate themselves in different ways?
#
Definitely, I'm happy that technology is disrupting this.
#
And then you don't have to sit and listen to a university teacher who's boring or who
#
doesn't teach you what you want to learn.
#
You can always learn it outside.
#
But the problem is, the problem still remains, Amit, you are just perpetuating the inequality
#
in the society that way, right?
#
How many people, like, it's a sad thing, right?
#
One day I was walking on this Besanagar beach in Chennai.
#
It was late in the night around, let's say late in the night is 10 o'clock for me.
#
So, and then I saw these children who are these children of tribes who are selling few
#
things on the beach, right?
#
And they had a smartphone and you know what they were looking at some random stuff on
#
They have technology, Amit, they have access.
#
But then what do they end up watching?
#
Now, who is going to help them to streamline this whole thing?
#
Who's going to show them a way that there are, you know, I wish the child had been able
#
to see something useful, but then the parents might not know what is useful to see on the
#
The parents would just want them to see the smartphones and then just stay there because
#
they can sell something on the beach, right?
#
Now, it's great that everything should get disrupted.
#
I feel everything should get challenged, right?
#
Because I kept on challenging things in any institutions that I've been.
#
I kept on asking questions.
#
Why should it be this way only?
#
Why can't we do something else?
#
But then the question is, I got access to these things because I said that I had subsidized
#
education, public education.
#
Now, how many people can do this on their own, right?
#
Without having somebody to guide them.
#
Somebody at their home should be learning to teach them.
#
They should have some role models to follow, right?
#
This is where I will a little bit take you off and then I'll tell you one example from
#
So I told you that my father came from the village to move to the city to work as a machine
#
operator in a factory, right?
#
Now, why do you think my father got the job in them?
#
Because, you know, those days, even now, manufacturing jobs are like scars, right?
#
Nobody can just become a machine operator, right?
#
But how did my father end up that?
#
My father is from the same dominant caste that the owner of the factory is from.
#
So he ended up in that job.
#
Now, if there was a schedule caste person who would have moved from the same village
#
to the factory, he would have been given a cleaner job in the factory.
#
So you know that the role, then you have somebody in your network to actually look at,
#
okay, now I can be a machine operator.
#
I don't have to sit in the village and then where there is no work and then not earn
#
anything, I can move to a city because I had my network there and I could get a job there.
#
Similarly, see, think of why did I imagine all the places and I went to Bitspilani.
#
You know, in our times, we used to make the fun, we used to call it the Brahmin Institute
#
of Technology and Science because 60-70% of them were Brahmins there and they had access
#
to that institute and then the person who told me that, hey, there is this program in IIT Madras
#
that you can look at, it was himself a Brahmin.
#
From IIT Madras, I went to IJIDR who again another person who told me that there is this
#
institute called IJIDR.
#
Again, he was from dominant caste category.
#
The places I went to had people there who could point me in that direction, who could be showing
#
that you can do something like this.
#
If somebody had not guided me all the way along, how could I have gone to different places?
#
Even Bitspilani, nobody at my home knew what is Bitspilani.
#
Before my principal came and told my father, see, your daughter has scored a lot.
#
I think she has a very good chance of getting into a university called Bitspilani.
#
Why don't you try there?
#
Again, which caste she was from?
#
She was not from any randomness thing.
#
All were from dominant caste categories or upper castes like Brahmins.
#
They had the knowledge to point to this and they always had role models.
#
Now, think of all these disruptive, how many people in rural areas will know about the
#
I'm sure there are much more deserving people than me to sit here and talk to you about
#
their life stories, about the things that they have faced in their lives.
#
I knew you because we ended up coming to the same conference and then we knew each other,
#
we talked and then we thought that this is something that we can do.
#
But all this while, I've always been fortunate that in one sense that I've been from a
#
dominant caste category.
#
But what about other people who don't have that kind of privilege?
#
Similarly, women who are not as privileged as men in their same homes.
#
Similarly, you can think of all these kind of differences.
#
Definitely, technology can help people to pursue what they want to pursue.
#
But then I don't think the inequality will go away unless the state does something about
#
it, unless the education system has changed.
#
And I feel that especially the public education system has to be really looked at if you don't
#
want the inequality to get further and further higher.
#
That's something I feel because I go to IIT Madras because of the quota system.
#
I have talked to people who are from different caste groups and then they have shared their
#
perspective and that's when I started to realize the benefits I have got throughout my life
#
coming from a dominant caste category.
#
Why do you think my parents had this aspiration that if I'm educated well enough that I can
#
Because they had role models in their network.
#
They had somebody to look up to.
#
My own father's company's owner's daughter was doing so well and then my father always
#
used to point at her, you know, this is how you should be later in life.
#
You can be one of them.
#
So they had somebody to look at, right?
#
So even when I had to fill the form for BITS planning, nobody in my home knew what to fill
#
How to fill a college form.
#
So we went to a professor again from our network.
#
He was there and he helped us to say, okay, this is how you can fill this form.
#
I remember we don't know what is rural or urban, right?
#
What should I write in that form?
#
Are you from rural or urban area?
#
I don't know what is rural or urban.
#
So we had some people to look up to, right?
#
We had some people to help and then point out in that direction.
#
So how will technology equalize this existing inequality?
#
That's my question to you.
#
I agree with about the intensity of the problem.
#
My sense is that first of all, I don't think it's a binary
#
that either the state reforms a public education system or you do something.
#
I think that, you know, obviously you should have to keep putting pressure on the state
#
to do whatever it has to do.
#
But equally, I think that if you are actually going to break through this inequality that
#
kind of exists, you know, the solutions will come from outside.
#
I think the state has failed and will continue to fail.
#
And in any case, it's an incredibly slow process.
#
So, you know, how this problem is solved, I don't know.
#
Obviously, you're right that there is no point in having
#
all the knowledge in the world available on your smartphone
#
if the natural human tendency is to just serve Instagram reels
#
and just keep scrolling and swiping and all of that.
#
But even there, A, there will be a few people who are adequately self-directed
#
to actually seek out a better life for themselves.
#
But B, at a broader, more important systemic level,
#
you hope that there is some kind of inflection point
#
where people start valuing that more, you know,
#
whether it is role models in popular culture who come up in that way,
#
that at some level that the vicious circle becomes a virtuous cycle.
#
And I'm skeptical of that happening through the state.
#
I'm skeptical of that happening in a top-down way.
#
I think if it happens, it has to happen in an organic, bottom-up way.
#
Ultimately, the point is technology is blind to what your identity is
#
or what your last name is.
#
But it's just a question of having access to that technology,
#
which is kind of getting wider.
#
And then something providing that flip and, you know, pushing you,
#
giving you the conviction perhaps that you can do it and pushing you to do that.
#
So I don't have an answer to that.
#
But I am certain that there are answers to that lying ahead of us in the future.
#
And anybody listening to this who cares about this, you know,
#
you be the disruptor and imagine what, you know, you and I possibly can't right now.
#
Yeah, I can give you an example on that, how one of the things right from our work.
#
So in one of the projects that I do, we work with the garment factory workers in Hubli
#
and where we give them this access to this app, right?
#
Now, you are giving women, you want to give women workers access to the app
#
where they can, at the click of their app, they can get their earned wage access, right?
#
So the salary cycle is from seventh of one month to the seventh of next month.
#
But in between, if you have emergencies, you will, you might end up borrowing from a money lender.
#
So even if you borrow thousand, you will have to return it as thousand hundred.
#
The interest rate on that is just, you know, just too much.
#
It's just 10% on one month, right?
#
So you want to, you want to break the cycle of borrowing at a very high interest rate.
#
So you give them the earned wage access.
#
Of course, you, you don't want them to end up overspending also.
#
So what you do is you put a cap on number of times you can withdraw
#
or the percentage you withdraw.
#
Like you can only get 50% of your earned wage.
#
You will always get the remaining on your day of the salary
#
so that you don't make end up people's overspending on things, right?
#
In this case, the women workers, to start with, think of a Hubli factory.
#
The workers, a lot of them do not have access to smartphones.
#
Most often, their husbands have the access to smart smartphones.
#
And even if they have access to smartphones,
#
they're very, very skeptical of using their, especially payment apps.
#
They think that they might end up losing some money somewhere.
#
In our study, we found that all the, all the workers get their salaries in their bank accounts
#
and they all have debit cards.
#
But hardly 50%, hardly 50% of women knew how to withdraw money from ATM.
#
So you are giving them, they have financial,
#
government will call this as a financial, they are all financially inclusive.
#
They have access to their own bank accounts.
#
They have their money coming into their bank accounts every month.
#
You have debit cards so you can build up savings.
#
You should finally start accessing loan products
#
and everything that is offered by banks.
#
No, none of that happens.
#
Half the women, they say that their debit card is with somebody else in the family.
#
They withdraw the money in cash and give, or they control the entire money, right?
#
Now, if you want to give earn wage access to these women,
#
you cannot give it, you cannot ask them to use the app, right?
#
So what we did is that we have this, we have these tablets placed in the factory, right?
#
So if you go to work, you can just go to the tablet.
#
You just show the QR card that is attached to your ID card
#
and then it opens to your account.
#
It will tell you how much earn wage access you have as of that date
#
and you can decide how much money you want to withdraw, right?
#
Totally, this takes four steps.
#
And women, even that 60-70% of the women were so skeptical to use, even touch the app.
#
They wouldn't even come near it, you know?
#
They will stand like a few feet away from it and then they were like very hesitant.
#
So we made sure that we have given them training.
#
Even after training, we made sure that there are, you know,
#
point of contacts near the tablet itself so that it takes some time for women to get used to it
#
and start using on their own and so on.
#
After some women, after using it for a few times,
#
they realized that they are now confident to use it on their own
#
and then they now go and then happily click and then withdraw whenever they want to, right?
#
So that gap has to be filled.
#
You know, even with innovation, we need to think about,
#
oh, now the technology treats everybody has access to app.
#
Everybody has internet.
#
The factory's internet is what we are using.
#
So you don't need smartphones, you know, you don't need internet.
#
We have solved that problem.
#
But still overcoming that fear, right?
#
I can now go and operate the app on my own.
#
Still needs even more push.
#
And that is where I'm saying that push is very important.
#
If you want to really think of solutions that is accessible to all, right?
#
And once the women start using and then start understanding,
#
when is now the women come to us and say, hey, this is such an easy thing to do.
#
Now I'm thinking of owning a smartphone on my own.
#
Why shouldn't I own a smartphone?
#
I thought that I can never.
#
I don't know to use these things.
#
That's why I never thought of buying a smartphone for myself.
#
Now I see that it's so easy thing to do.
#
Why can't I use, right?
#
Some people are motivated to even purchase their smartphones.
#
Then they start using the app.
#
Now that push is where who will do that and how in society,
#
who will come and fill that gap is always a question, right?
#
And that's why I tell, you know, technology,
#
those people who think of these descriptive technologies,
#
I tell them that you think when I talk to youngsters,
#
I said, think further ahead, see who benefits the most,
#
who are the first takers of this, who are the last takers of this
#
and what kind of push is needed for others, right?
#
To finally make sure that the benefits reach
#
almost as many people as possible, right?
#
So this is where I said that, you know,
#
technology is even if it is there for everybody,
#
and then I'll give you another example.
#
So I told you to what extent we have tried to make sure that
#
most women are able to benefit from it.
#
But some women came and told us, hey, you're giving this,
#
so if you click that 1000 rupees, I want to withdraw 1000 rupees,
#
it will go directly to your salary account.
#
The same day it gets credited to the salary account
#
and you can withdraw from your bank account,
#
you're seeing your debit card.
#
Some women have come and told us, hey,
#
but you know, my husband has a debit card.
#
I don't, if I withdraw this money,
#
I want badly wanted to withdraw the money,
#
but then it will go to my husband.
#
So I ended up borrowing outside only
#
because I don't want my husband to know,
#
if he knows, he will only not allow me to use it
#
or there will be unnecessary, you know,
#
altercation or violence at home.
#
I don't want to even go in that direction.
#
So, okay, now you've come, you know, where,
#
till where the app works, right?
#
Till the case where women also have access
#
to their debit cards, access to their earnings,
#
But then it cannot solve the problems
#
that they face externally due to norms at home or outside, right?
#
So that understanding is very important for us, right?
#
So what is your last mile?
#
That you need to really know.
#
And that I feel is, I feel that's where
#
the government is very important.
#
You know, then the last mile connectivity
#
will be given by whom is the question, right?
#
Because the private players can only go to some extent, right?
#
Even if the company says,
#
I will take care of all the costs of this earned wage access
#
and I will make sure that everybody,
#
it doesn't solve every woman's problem
#
is what I'm trying to just say.
#
There are still women because of norms
#
or because of where the society is
#
who will still miss out on these things.
#
I mean, I feel that's a great example,
#
a really eye-opening example
#
of a kind of last mile problem
#
which would never have struck me
#
because a lot of people would have come up
#
with the tech solution and thought that,
#
okay, we have solved this and et cetera, et cetera,
#
empowering women and et cetera, et cetera.
#
But that last mile is a huge problem.
#
And over here, like you said,
#
you know, the factory makes the effort,
#
but they can also only go so far.
#
If finally the money is credited to the account
#
and the husband has a debit card, what do you do?
#
And at some level, I think I'm skeptical
#
of what even the state can do there.
#
At some level, there are some social problems
#
where I feel state coercion will not solve anything
#
or even make things worse.
#
I think it's just a fundamental social problem
#
and different kinds of pushes from within society
#
All I'm here trying to say is
#
it needs a multi-pronged and multi-layered things.
#
I keep telling people that, you know,
#
there are so many layers here, right?
#
You have norms, you have access, physical access,
#
then digital access, so many different layers
#
You should exactly know what layers you're unraveling
#
and what you're not, right?
#
And for other layers, what kind of approaches are needed?
#
So I'm saying that this is not a completely waste of thing
#
If it benefits at least 30% of them, it does benefit
#
because they are women in need
#
and they make use of this emergency money
#
and it helps their lives.
#
But then we should also be aware that
#
where we are not able to solve certain things,
#
what are these issues and what causes these issues
#
and what other different actors or players you need
#
to approach the issues from different directions
#
No, very wise words and I agree entirely with you
#
and I think a lot of people will be happy
#
just with that intellectual and technocratic solution
#
that, oh, this is how it works
#
without having the genuine empathy for the last recipient
#
and solving the last kind of problem.
#
I have a tangential question because you pointed out
#
that many women don't control their smartphones, right?
#
And I remember Santosh Desai once
#
in the context of smartphones in general,
#
not with relation to either India or to men and women,
#
but in the context of smartphones in general,
#
pointed out that how smartphones, you know,
#
give us a sense of agency that we often don't recognize
#
that for many people, the first time in their lives
#
that they actually control something,
#
something dances to their tune,
#
something follows their orders,
#
a place where they are in charge is the smartphone
#
that they press a button,
#
the phone does what it wants,
#
a swipe, the phone follows their command
#
and et cetera, et cetera.
#
And it seems to me at that profound level
#
to be a proxy for agency.
#
And therefore just that fact
#
that many women don't control their smartphones
#
also tells you everything you need to know
#
about the agency in their lives.
#
And four or five years ago in this very room
#
in the Takshashila Institution,
#
I had an episode with Nidhi Gupta,
#
Devika Kher and Hamsini Hamsiaran
#
and it was called Metrics for Empowerment
#
where we were brainstorming over unconventional metrics
#
to figure out if women are getting more empowered or not.
#
And I guess this would be one of those classic kind of metrics
#
or proxies by which you can sort of figure it out
#
and you won't think of it as obvious to begin with,
#
but then you look a little deeper,
#
like I think one of the proxies one of them came up with
#
was about who orders the groceries in the house
#
and so on and so forth.
#
So before we go in for a break
#
and we'll get back to our narrative after we come back,
#
but before we go in for a break,
#
could you think aloud on all the different kinds of metrics
#
and proxies you would have absorbed in your work
#
which people like me will completely be oblivious to?
#
Yeah, one of the things that we keep questioning
#
in our work in Good Business Lab is how do we measure agency?
#
What is agency to women itself?
#
What does it mean for themselves?
#
What does it mean to us?
#
And how do we capture these things, right?
#
And how do we understand this properly?
#
So these are questions that I keep, you know,
#
that is where I always love to go and sit in the factory
#
and observe myself, right?
#
What do the workers think when you're just,
#
you know, asking your surveyors to do this survey and tell us
#
and then you look at numbers.
#
Okay, 50% said yes to this question, 20% said yes,
#
yes or no, strongly agree, disagree and those things,
#
you know, you have seen those surveys, right?
#
You don't know what to make sense of them if you're not there
#
and you see what are themselves.
#
Talking to these women, observing them,
#
observing them at their workplace,
#
you think that, okay, you've given them a job,
#
they get their salaries, now the woman is employed.
#
No, you have to come and see what their workplace is.
#
You have to see what the kind of work they do,
#
the kind of control they have over their work, right?
#
The way they are yelled at in a factory floor, right?
#
Let's say, or the way they have been,
#
they can only do a certain kind of jobs, right?
#
So I tell this example to people that
#
you think that Garman's factory is like 80% are women
#
but then you see that in tailors,
#
you see women and scores of women and women
#
but then the moment you see somebody in finishing
#
or packing sections, you will see a lot of men there.
#
Somebody ironing, again, men there.
#
Even within the garment industry,
#
which you think is so much more women-oriented,
#
supervisors are men there.
#
So, you know, even within the industry
#
dominated by women themselves,
#
the women empowerment is missing, right?
#
Forget all other things where women are only 10%
#
or 5% of the industry itself.
#
So then question is what is agency?
#
How do we measure this agency or empowerment?
#
Even among women who work and earn their own lives,
#
they support their family, right?
#
So let me give you an example.
#
So one of the things when you think of agency is that
#
If they don't want it, why do they not want it, right?
#
For instance, when we ask women
#
what do they do with their own salary,
#
we record their transactions every day.
#
7th March, the salary is credited to my account.
#
7th March evening, the salary goes to my husband's account, right?
#
Then you see that next Sunday,
#
she gets 200 rupees from her husband.
#
The Sunday after that, again, another 200 rupees.
#
So you are like, what is happening here?
#
Why do you surrender your entire salary?
#
She's like, I don't have the mental bandwidth.
#
I work here eight hours.
#
Then I go and do all the domestic work at home.
#
Why should I care about managing my money?
#
I just give it to my husband.
#
Let him decide what he wants.
#
I don't have the mental bandwidth to even think of these things.
#
I don't want to get involved, right?
#
So you see that one part, one aspect of her life, right,
#
is affecting her other aspects to be,
#
she doesn't even want the control, right?
#
So the question is why,
#
whether they want to have that agency,
#
why are they not having that agency?
#
Is it by choice or is it by...
#
They don't have that awareness.
#
That's why they're leaving the control to somebody.
#
There's one woman I remember interviewing her
#
just before COVID lockdown came.
#
This was in January 2020, no, February 2020.
#
And then she was saying that I lost my husband
#
and then that's when I started working.
#
So we asked how women came to this factory work.
#
then I asked her that, but how did you end up here?
#
Because she was saying that,
#
she was just crying profusely saying that,
#
you know, my parents had brought me up like a princess.
#
I never had to go out for anything.
#
I was given everything at home.
#
I didn't even know how to cross the road, right?
#
I didn't even know how to take a bus.
#
And then my husband continued to take care of me in the same way.
#
I didn't have to be on my own at all ever in my life.
#
And then my husband suddenly passes away.
#
And now I'm here, like the whole world on me,
#
the burden of this whole family on me,
#
I have to now take care of myself, my children.
#
And she started crying that I have never been useful.
#
So you are saying you're pushing women
#
who have never been independent on their own,
#
never taken decisions for themselves in their life.
#
And you give them a job and say that
#
now you take care of everything.
#
They just don't know what to do.
#
It becomes so overwhelming for them.
#
And she was just crying so profusely
#
that she said that I'm not able to take this.
#
Even though it's just managing herself and her children,
#
she said that because I've never been independent in my life,
#
I don't know what is independence.
#
This independence is so much a burden on me
#
rather than liberating for me.
#
So you should look from that perspective
#
that when women don't want to go out,
#
so for instance, they will be very happy not to go out.
#
They said that I know to withdraw from my ATM,
#
but I don't want to withdraw.
#
Why should I go all the way to there?
#
I have never gone out on my own.
#
Even if I have to go to a doctor who is nearby for a fever,
#
I will always go with somebody.
#
When the factory opens, just see,
#
observe women going to the factory.
#
They will all be holding hands and walking.
#
They will all be always in groups.
#
You'll hardly find women coming on their own,
#
independently walking to the factory.
#
They need companions even to go inside the factory,
#
though they would have been working there for a long time.
#
So there was this very nice study that was done in Bangladesh
#
and one professor illustrated that.
#
So they try to give training to women to make sure that
#
from workers, they become supervisors.
#
They wanted more female supervisors in it.
#
Then the factory realized that when they become supervisors,
#
they have to wait till all the workers leave
#
and make sure that all the machines are in order,
#
everything is in proper order before they leave.
#
So it takes another half an hour before the supervisor leaves.
#
And because of which many women refused to come for the job,
#
they said that now what will society think of me?
#
If I go alone and walk in the street,
#
I'm not walking with other people.
#
What were you doing for extra half an hour?
#
Why are you coming late alone?
#
They said that this is too much for them to take it.
#
So just imagine, we would not have thought of it.
#
We would think that making them a supervisor,
#
giving them a promotion would be something very empowering for them.
#
But if you talk from the women's life,
#
there are other domains of our life that we are missing
#
by looking at it narrowly.
#
When you look at only financial empowerment
#
or when you look at whether she can go outside
#
at 6 o'clock or not or 12 o'clock or not,
#
you can come up with any number of metrics,
#
but it will always capture one aspect of her life.
#
And you don't know how our other aspects of our life interact with this one
#
to actually say whether she's empowered,
#
whether she's wanting it or not,
#
whether she believes she's empowered or not.
#
So these aspects is what doesn't come out
#
and capturing this is the most important part, I feel.
#
This intra-household level and what they are perceived outside,
#
women are so conscious of this, what the village...
#
So I'll give you another example.
#
In Chennai, when I was in Chennai,
#
I had a person helping us with the cleaning work at my home
#
and she was a lady in her late 40s.
#
She was walking around 12 in the noon.
#
She was walking in the sun and when she came in,
#
she was almost like so thirsty and gasping for breath.
#
I was like, why don't you carry an umbrella?
#
It was not a very long distance from her home,
#
but I was like, why don't you carry an umbrella?
#
She's like, ma'am, already this slum that she was coming from,
#
already these people always have these talks going behind me
#
that look at this woman going to work.
#
She wants to be like bossing around.
#
That's why she just doesn't listen to her husband or her son.
#
She wants to earn money and look at the way she's going
#
as if she's going for an office job.
#
Now, if I carry an umbrella, what will the society think of me?
#
Already they talk so much behind me.
#
I don't want more comments on me.
#
So I will not carry an umbrella.
#
She was even ready to walk in the noon
#
and under this really hot weather of Chennai,
#
but not wanting to carry an umbrella.
#
Imagine the extent they would go to not to be seen as somebody,
#
not to be seen as something else.
#
So even like a lot of women, we ask them, who's the primary?
#
There's one question we always ask,
#
who's the primary owner of your household?
#
A lot of women in garment factories would say they are the ones
#
because circumstances had pushed them to provide for their family.
#
That's when a lot of them end up in factory jobs actually.
#
Their husband is an alcoholic or husband passes away,
#
husband doesn't have enough work or father is not there,
#
father is in some serious illness, lots of deaths and so on.
#
They'll say they are the primary owners.
#
But then you ask them, who's the head of the family?
#
What is the husband doing?
#
My husband is not earning.
#
But they feel very proud to say that their husband is the head of the family.
#
So, you know, he is a boss.
#
There is no doubt about it.
#
I don't want to break that norm.
#
I want to keep that norm,
#
but then I want to provide for my family and support my family.
#
That doesn't make me the head of the family.
#
That doesn't make me the decision maker for the family.
#
You know, so these are some important things
#
when we ask these questions, yes or no.
#
Can you withdraw from India?
#
You would get these nice answers.
#
But then the reality is the way they perceive is very different.
#
And we have to somehow get to this
#
and then understand from women's perspective to see
#
what kind of norms they face,
#
what kind of other aspects of the life they face have
#
to feel that they are empowered or not, right?
#
So I just wanted to, you know, give you these different examples
#
that the stories that I've heard to illustrate that, you know,
#
it goes beyond, the empowerment goes much beyond.
#
No, no, thank you for these examples.
#
And the one about the lady walking in the sun at noon is so moving
#
because you realize that there is something stronger
#
than the harsh light and the heat of the sun.
#
And that is a harsh heat of society itself.
#
And, you know, it's not enough like that.
#
It's such a complicated question.
#
What does somebody want?
#
And it is not as if what you want is coming from a vacuum
#
where what you want is what you want.
#
It's, you know, society has such demands
#
that it becomes kind of problematic to answer.
#
And it leads to your having to think about things
#
in a counterintuitive way.
#
Like I remember, you know, earlier episodes
#
that I've done on women's participation in the workforce
#
with Namita Bhandare, Vishrana Bhattacharya and so on.
#
Alice and I might have discussed it as well.
#
And one of the things that one of the, I mean,
#
obviously it's very multifactorial,
#
but one of the factors that when I first heard,
#
it took me by surprise, but no longer does,
#
is that when, you know, one theory is that
#
when families reach a certain level of wealth
#
where the woman no longer has to work because of circumstances,
#
then to protect her honor, she, you know, no longer works.
#
I sit at the agency of the woman that, oh,
#
I no longer need to work.
#
And, you know, I can be at home finally.
#
And again, it's a choice that you have to respect.
#
But then I begin to wonder about what do we do
#
about this chicken and egg situation
#
because a very first order and simplistic way
#
of looking at it would be that it's about,
#
you empower a woman through economic empowerment.
#
If she is in charge of money, if she is a primary owner,
#
it's fine, you solve the problem.
#
Obviously it is not, you know, society is different
#
and that social empowerment is very, very far from happening.
#
And I wonder how much economic empowerment
#
it would take till you get to that social empowerment.
#
But my question there is sort of what can drive that change?
#
You know, what can drive that change
#
where you have social change in a way
#
that women are not driven to work by circumstances,
#
but because they want to, you know,
#
and that these considerations,
#
like if I hold an umbrella above my head,
#
you know, everybody is going to look so askance at me.
#
Those considerations don't come up.
#
So do you think here in the 21st century that,
#
you know, one way of looking at it
#
is that the pace of change is very slow.
#
But another way of looking at it is that we're not really changing,
#
that economically maybe we are better off,
#
but is society really changing?
#
So what's your observation?
#
Let me give you one very interesting thing
#
that I came upon, like one of my,
#
like my son's, one of his friend's mother,
#
her daughter, she wants to bring her up like a princess.
#
So I was a little shocked.
#
What do you mean by bringing up a daughter like princess?
#
See, I don't want her to learn all this household chores.
#
I know that she will, maybe she has to later pick it on.
#
I want her to be like, you know, not doing work,
#
like really treat like a princess.
#
The problem with this mindset is also,
#
is that you're not allowing women to become independent.
#
you're raising them up in such a way
#
that you always want them to be dependent
#
on somebody for something, right?
#
Like imagine if I had not taken my father's school,
#
I'm still like, I still have this dependence
#
on somebody to always drive me to somewhere, right?
#
I remember once we conducted a survey,
#
how do women travel to work?
#
And is mobility a big constraint for women?
#
And then in one place that we conducted,
#
these were all office going women.
#
So some level of tertiary education that they do.
#
You had men and women in the survey,
#
and then you can't imagine,
#
I was just surprised by the percentage of women
#
who said that dropped by husband,
#
dropped, they chose this thing,
#
dropped by husband, dropped by husband.
#
you have not crossed that barrier that you still want,
#
even if you come to work, you still want somebody to drop.
#
How many men would report that drop by their wives, right?
#
It was very, you know, a big revelation for me.
#
Like, oh my God, we haven't even reached this level
#
that women are able to even independently move around you.
#
Forget those people who don't have access
#
and all these other women who are earning and then.
#
So this independence, right?
#
That making your children independent is not,
#
this is a big issue, I feel like.
#
So another example I can give is
#
during the campus placements,
#
we would see these boys are all,
#
generally these boys are very tensed on getting a job.
#
And there was this one guy who was like sitting
#
interview after interview and he did not make it.
#
He was like, ma'am, if I go back,
#
what will my parents say if I don't have a job?
#
And then there are these girls who would not be very,
#
who did not have the pressure to have that job.
#
They know that if they go back,
#
they'll still get married to somebody, right?
#
If they have a job, they might work for one or two years
#
and then still they will get married to somebody.
#
If they don't have a job also, they get married.
#
They just might get married sooner, that's all.
#
So that pressure of getting a job was much more for men than for women.
#
Again, this is a kind of expectation you set for your children, right?
#
You don't raise your girls in such a way that you be independent.
#
You go after your desires and you set up your own life.
#
It's not like husbands are going to provide you,
#
parents are going to provide you.
#
You always set that expectation so that it becomes then that,
#
okay, as you said, I reached a certain level of wealth.
#
Now working has become a choice for me.
#
But for how many men is that a choice?
#
You can do a survey on how many women want their spouses to be a house husband.
#
Hardly there will be a few percentage of women who will agree
#
that their spouses can be house husbands.
#
So you understand that, right?
#
Like the expectation for men is to be on their own and provide for their family.
#
That's their primary this thing.
#
And the expectation for women is like, okay, you study.
#
If you get a job, well and good.
#
And then if you can manage a job and family well and good, that's up to you.
#
Otherwise, you still run a family, right?
#
There is no expectation that you should be on your own.
#
You should learn to live your life.
#
You should pay for your things, right?
#
We all are telling that like I look at my family.
#
Everybody now is fighting for equally.
#
The property should be divided equally between boys and girls.
#
There should not be any discrimination between son and daughters, right?
#
Which is a happy thing.
#
But then who pays the debt of the family?
#
It always comes to the son.
#
The son will always end up taking the debt of the family.
#
Why are not daughters given the same this thing?
#
If you're going to get the property, then you should as well pay the debt.
#
If you're wishing to get the property from your parents.
#
So that expectation is, I think, that independence.
#
Making our children independent and asking them to, you know, learn to live their lives
#
and learn to take care of themselves.
#
That is not there in our society, which is where the biggest, that's where the...
#
And then once that is not there, you get your daughters educated.
#
And then immediately after that marriage.
#
And then right after my marriage, my father uttered these words.
#
Now all my duty is done.
#
I have no further duties towards my daughter.
#
Then there is no more father and daughter anymore?
#
You were the one who motivated me throughout my life to get me educated.
#
Then I should hold a job.
#
But then once I get married, my father thinks that I have nothing more towards you.
#
I have done everything that I am supposed to do.
#
Marriage is the end of it, right?
#
So I was shocked to hear those words from my father because that was the first time
#
I thought of my father otherwise.
#
And then later again, he said this word when I left academy and I moved to a research organization.
#
But you know, I encouraged you to do a PhD because
#
teaching job is what is a honorable job for women.
#
Now you want to leave that honorable job and go to somewhere else.
#
What kind of work are you doing?
#
You know, blah, blah, blah.
#
And then that's when I realized, oh my God, I thought my father wanted me to get well educated.
#
And then go for good jobs and so on.
#
But then even in that, there was a very specific gender, this thing, angle that he took.
#
That only teaching job can give you this balance in life where you can take care of your work
#
Other jobs will just make you focus more.
#
You will leave your family.
#
We had this big argument.
#
And then that's when I realized, okay, there is more to it, more underlying to this.
#
So that one, this is where I want to say that we are raising our daughters and sons very
#
And we just set zero expectations for our daughters that you don't have to take care
#
Somebody always will be there to take care of you.
#
All you have to do is just maintain the household, right?
#
That's the most primary thing to do.
#
This is where I think that whole thing, people wanting to work and be independent, that whole
#
And then as they grow up, it gets more and more rigid for them.
#
I think in a sense that boy during placement thing who is totally stressed and going through
#
interview after interview, in a sense that boy grows up to be the father who tells his
#
daughter, now my duty is done.
#
And that person is also a victim of the system in the sense that just as my episode with
#
Shreyaana was called Loneliness of the Indian Woman, I did an episode with Nikhil Taneja
#
called Loneliness of the Indian Man, where men are also trapped by patriarchy in the
#
sense that there is that pressure of high expectations on them that you are not a man
#
unless you are a provider.
#
And I can imagine that boy thinking, shit, I am not a man if I don't get a good job.
#
And your father thinking all his life, that pressure that, oh, I've got a daughter, I've
#
got to get her married off and then I'm a man, right?
#
And that pressure is so terrible.
#
And equally, just as they are imprisoned by high expectations, I think the girls in that
#
placement are also weighed down by the tyranny of low expectations.
#
And that is also crushing because they will never then strive to come close to achieving
#
what their true potential would otherwise be.
#
Yeah, and most often it is dictated by where they will finally, you know, get married to,
#
right? There was this women in factories, scores and scores of women, every unmarried
#
women I've interviewed.
#
I asked him, will you continue to do work or even continue to do this factory job?
#
And so how can I say that, ma'am, it's all up to whom I get married to, where my in-laws
#
are, whether they will allow or not, and so on.
#
Even now, I just was so heartbroken.
#
Like there was this 22 year old girl who has been working for five years in the garment
#
factory. She has saved some money for herself and so on.
#
And she said that, ma'am, but I have resigned my job.
#
I'll be here only for two months.
#
And then she's like, because I'm engaged to a person.
#
And then my in-laws have said that there's no need for you to work and all.
#
You just come here and stay with us.
#
My son will take care of you.
#
Don't worry about that.
#
We'll take care of your daughter.
#
I really want to go and say something.
#
But then I just had to listen to these stories.
#
And they have worked for four, five years and they didn't feel empowered enough that
#
they should keep their jobs or they should continue their jobs.
#
Because see, most often in one of the factories in South of in South Tamil Nadu,
#
women said that they were they were staying in hostels.
#
Their parents will come and visit them every week on Sunday.
#
And they will buy all things that they need, like toiletries and so on.
#
And they had mess food.
#
Debit cards were with their parents.
#
They didn't even some women.
#
I met in the factory for years.
#
They didn't even have few hundreds of rupees with themselves to spend.
#
They said, but why should I have my father?
#
My parents only buy everything for me.
#
I don't have to have the money.
#
I mean, but emergency money.
#
What happens when you fall sick?
#
What happens when you need?
#
But I don't have I don't need that, ma'am.
#
If I call, my father will come and pick me up, ma'am.
#
Whenever I want to go to my house, they will only come and pick me up and go.
#
There's one woman who said that she was well she was she looked well educated,
#
unlike other factory women who are generally 10th or 12th grade.
#
They do not have they do not have college education.
#
But one of this woman, she had college education.
#
She was talking very well.
#
I'm like, I try to push her.
#
Why are you not studying in college?
#
You said you're interested in psychology or something.
#
And then she finally revealed that no.
#
I had this boyfriend and my parents came to know of our relationship.
#
My parents didn't want me to meet him.
#
So they thought the factory is the best place.
#
The factory won't allow you to go outside.
#
You are locked inside the hostel.
#
Only if a parent comes and takes you, you can go out.
#
So they put me here thinking that I will not be able to meet my boyfriend
#
if I'm in the factory working in the factory.
#
The society can think of all these different ways where you don't want that autonomy given
#
So they have really not.
#
They have contributed to their family.
#
They have told me that they have paid this debt of their father.
#
They paid this medical expenditure for the father and so on.
#
But they still never felt empowered because they have never lived their life.
#
That's what I've told in one of my episodes to Alice Evans as well, that unless you taste
#
the fruits of your wages, unless you can buy a dress for yourself or you can just go out
#
and eat what you want, why do you want to work?
#
Why should you do that paid work, that tankless job for hours and hours and six days in a week?
#
So think of these women.
#
We keep saying that jobs will change things.
#
But unless other conditions also change, how long do you think they want to be in that
#
And they know that when they are going to be married, they have to take care of the
#
household as well as this.
#
Why should anybody even demand for such a thing from their in-laws that they want to
#
work, that they want to continue their job?
#
All of them ended up saying that, but don't you want to work?
#
You're getting your own money.
#
Yes, ma'am, we will see.
#
But maybe we will buy a tailoring machine and keep it at home.
#
I've learned some tailoring.
#
I'll do some tailoring from home.
#
I don't think they will allow me to go outside and work.
#
You know, this is the kind of responses and I'm not talking about decades back or something.
#
I'm talking about very recent research of mine and where these things come up and then
#
you feel sad that finally they have chosen what is optimum given their constraints.
#
And I don't think everybody has this willpower to sit and fight and argue.
#
And then I found my journey very, very, sometimes very exhausting.
#
Sometimes I felt like I'm this only person who's arguing like this all the time for
#
You feel lonely in these battles.
#
Sometimes it's better you don't take these battles if you do not have that strong willpower
#
That's where I said conviction becomes so important to pursue what you think is what
#
Yeah, it's so tragic that what from the outside more women working looks like empowerment.
#
But if you look a little closer, you realize that daughters and wives being instrumental
#
for the men in their lives and just not being looked at as real people and that is so tragic.
#
My next question for you is that have you observed regional differences in this?
#
Because India is so diverse.
#
There is a sense we keep hearing that women in the South are more empowered.
#
I had an episode with Chris Ashok where he shared this theory that, you know, women in
#
the South work more and go to school more simply because of the food that they eat in
#
the sense that if you are a rice based culture, you can make rice for two days in the morning
#
and your cooking load is less.
#
Whereas in the North, you're just making chapati after chapati after chapati fresh for every
#
And that takes a stall.
#
And obviously everything is madly multifactorial and complex.
#
But I just wonder that if there are cultural part dependencies that come into play and
#
what are the regional differences that you've observed because everything you're describing
#
is just absolutely horrible.
#
And this is all from the South where we think that it's so much better in the South.
#
Yeah, it's not like things are so ideal in South.
#
It's just that you're comparing, you know, really worse parts with some other parts.
#
See, I would say there are a lot more factors to it, not just making chapatis or rice.
#
See, also, like when women go back, there should also be some job opportunities finally
#
that they can take it up.
#
So imagine they go going back to villages back in Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh, how many
#
job opportunities do they have?
#
And they finally end up doing mostly like seasonal agriculture work, which they themselves
#
won't consider it as, you know, working or contributing to the family or just working
#
as unpaid labor in their family.
#
So job opportunities also matter.
#
Maybe in South, they definitely has much more job opportunities compared to the North.
#
So even if women take breaks during marriage and other things, they're still able to
#
find something else and then come back at least at a later point of life.
#
Which is happening in the South and it may not happen.
#
And also, I feel definitely that, definitely in terms of empowerment and everything, South
#
Because like we have seen it also is from generation.
#
The moment you see mothers working, then you know that the daughters can know that
#
this is also something that you can do.
#
If you have more mothers not working, then you will think that, okay, this is the usual
#
way for the daughters as well.
#
So that, so historical listing factors definitely play a role.
#
Job opportunities play a role.
#
And also in terms of norms, South has been, because education levels and everything has
#
been much more than the, than the North.
#
Definitely these factors contribute, but it is very difficult.
#
This is the question that Vidya and I keep thinking about in other things.
#
Which is, what is finally dominating?
#
Is it the demand side situation, the opportunities or is it the supply side situation?
#
If there are, so Vidya keeps saying that, telling that if there are 100 jobs, why do,
#
if there are only 100 jobs, and let's say there are 200 people who want to get employment.
#
Now, why do 80 men get those jobs and 20 women only get?
#
Why, why not the other way?
#
Then there is definitely norm story because there are the, the kind of jobs women have
#
Women can take up is very limited.
#
So I told you, even within garment industry, the occupations that they take up is very
#
different from men, right?
#
And so then the, the, the opportunities get even more and more limited as you go towards
#
the towns and rural areas and so on, right?
#
But I feel one of the things is the migration to cities like Bangalore, right, can help a
#
lot because women will find, again, much more opportunities somewhere close to their homes
#
and in different ways than in, let's say, if I had migrated to, let's say, a factory,
#
which is there in south of Tamil Nadu, which doesn't have anything but the factory, right?
#
In that case, you know that when you go back, there is nothing else.
#
But in Bangalore, when you know that if you get to somebody, if you get married also,
#
another migrant who's also settled in Bangalore that you can continue to work there, right?
#
So where you migrate to, what kind of culture is there in the migration and what, what it
#
So, for instance, that factory in south of Tamil Nadu, it will take the women from the
#
They get a bus, they go to, they get a, they take a bus, they go to the market, they buy
#
things they want and they come back in the same bus.
#
But if you're, let's say, in a factory in Bangalore and you're staying in a hostel
#
and they don't have these kind of restrictions that there might be night curfews, which is
#
there in every women's hostel.
#
But still, at least during the daytime, if you're free to go around on your own, explore
#
the city, once you start enjoying that freedom of staying independently, what independence
#
truly means, what staying on your own means, then you might make these bold choices to
#
So that is, I think, maybe because the south has been more developed, maybe when women
#
start to explore more and that's when they start to understand what they can be mobile,
#
they can do things on their own.
#
That is when they also start coming back to work, right?
#
Taking up more work, even if they leave work for a certain while, which may not be the
#
case in the, in the north, right?
#
It depends upon finally where you end up going to after marriage and all those things as
#
So there's a lot of factors playing around and it's very hard to disentangle what is
#
the effect of different things.
#
But all of these contribute to some extent.
#
I also want to ask about a slightly more meta question and taking a step back, like
#
it's really, you know, people say India lives in three centuries at the same time,
#
So, you know, everything that you've described actually seems like the 19th century, but
#
I'll bring a 21st century thought into this about the relevance of marriage as an institution.
#
Like it seems to me that marriage is a terrible, oppressive nightmare institution, especially
#
for women, because once you're married, you're fucked, your life is over.
#
Like, you know, one of the great insights I've got in the course of the show, which
#
I keep bringing up because it was, it made me think so differently.
#
It was Chinmay Tummay's insight in his insight in his book, India Moving, where he points
#
out that the largest cause of migration within India is marriage.
#
Women get married and they go to their husband's home.
#
And when I think about that a little deeper, they go to their husband's home, their lives
#
are over, it is uprooted.
#
You know, men throughout their lives will have the same friends.
#
Women's friendships become circumscribed by circumstances.
#
And it's like, in that sense, it's absolutely horrible.
#
And in that sense, one metric, which I would say is a profoundly useful metric for seeing
#
if women are truly empowered is a marriage rate.
#
Like, I would want the marriage rate to dip, because as marriages are, they feel like a
#
form of imprisonment almost, and maybe not for privileged elite women in cities and all
#
that, but certainly outside of that.
#
So sort of what are sort of your thoughts on that?
#
And I understand that this is not a thought that would even occur for a microsecond to
#
any of these people, because that I will get married and have kids is written into the
#
DNA of their lives and the DNA of the society.
#
But in general, I'm guessing that, you know, I mean, what do you feel about the institution
#
Is this a thought that has struck you?
#
I'll give you a counter example.
#
Once I was talking to this woman worker in the factory and she was saying that, so what
#
is it that you want to be after five years?
#
She said, I just want to be married and then just go away from here.
#
I don't have to work anymore.
#
So she said that marriage will mean that, see, I am here, I am saving all this money,
#
I'm having this gold savings.
#
So I'm slowly saving more gold.
#
And why do you want to save more gold?
#
Because see, ma'am, when if I want to marry somebody of a higher prospect, then I should
#
also give more dowry, right?
#
So I'm saving this gold for my marriage.
#
Once I have enough gold, then I'll get married.
#
Then I don't have to work in the factory anymore.
#
She was like, I'm waiting for that situation in my life.
#
I'm tired of this, you know, staying in this hostel, locked up in the hostel and working
#
eight hours or nine hours every day.
#
So you might say that marriage can be this, but then what else is the social?
#
See, unless I know that I can hang out with my friends or I can do something on my own,
#
why should I not want marriage?
#
Because marriage can give me a different social life.
#
And if I'm with my parents, I'm going to just get cursed that, oh, there's this daughter
#
of yours, why isn't she married?
#
Everybody would question your parents and you, you know, why is she unmarried?
#
What is wrong with her, right?
#
And if you're married, you escape that society and you get into a social life.
#
But what is life otherwise to these women?
#
You should think of that as well.
#
Yeah, I guess it's a stupid question to ask in this equilibrium.
#
But if you imagine a different equilibrium, maybe marriage is not part of that equilibrium,
#
Like, for instance, I remember I asked this one of my cousins that the kind of person
#
you are, I don't understand why you got married in the first place.
#
She said that, see, I can do everything.
#
My husband knows me well enough, so I can be on my own.
#
I don't have, it's a, it's a kind of arrangement that we have that, you know, you be on your
#
I could not do this when with my mother, staying with my mother.
#
So, you know, my, and my mother used to have these emotional blackmail.
#
See, look at this entire society is looking at me as a bad mother to have raised in a
#
daughter like this and blah, blah, blah.
#
And I, you have this, everybody constantly asking the parents what, what is wrong and
#
So she said that I'm much more, I'm actually happier because I can be on my own now and
#
I don't have to bother about.
#
And, and think of the, think of what my father said.
#
He said, my duty towards you is done.
#
I don't bother if you wear a short skirt or, you know, I've seen, literally seen parents
#
tell this to my own cousins that I don't care whether you wear a mini skirt anymore
#
or you color your hair or you should, you know, you have a boycott or whatever it is
#
because it's now your husband's problem to deal with.
#
It's not my problem anymore.
#
So, I mean, what do you say to that?
#
We think that, so you should always think that people are optimizing in the
#
circumstances that they deal with.
#
Either they break out of it completely and move out individually and then be on their
#
And again, a lot of, you have to, you have to face a lot more things too.
#
If you're, if you're a single woman living in a society where you can't even find a
#
Am I, look, even my colleagues, how many, just ask all of them.
#
How many of them will get a place in a city like Bangalore to find a, to find a place
#
Is it, it's hard at Bangalore?
#
Yeah, you, you, you will hear all the stories and the, I, I heard the story where the
#
landlord specifically asked, will you have male friends visiting you during day, during
#
So, I mean, how, where can you go?
#
Where, where can you go in this society?
#
How, how, as you said, some elite women can escape all these things, but what to the,
#
what to the rest of the women?
#
I'm telling you, I feel then it's just a choice between the devil and the deep blue
#
You know, you're saying things like it's such a hard life and then you're laughing
#
and then you're saying choice between devil and the deep blue sea and you're laughing.
#
So let's, I mean, there's no option.
#
But yeah, I, I just say, I would just say that they've made a rational choice given
#
that this is what they have tried to do.
#
And then this is the best thing I can arrive at.
#
And the best thing we can arrive at now is probably a quick break and then we'll get
#
some tea or coffee and come back.
#
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Welcome back to the Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm still chatting with Somya Dhanraj, who's showing enormous patience by, you know,
#
dealing with all of my questions.
#
And a thought that struck me earlier when we were talking about, you know, when we were
#
talking about IIT entrance exams, and it struck me again when you mentioned Kota in the break
#
when we were chatting, is something that, you know, one of my prior guests this week,
#
Deepak Vyas, brought up.
#
And, you know, I recorded with him last week, but his episode is not out yet, but it'll
#
And he had a thought experiment.
#
He said, for IIT, what if you change the entrance exams instead of doing them as you are doing
#
What if you have swimming test?
#
Right, because India has a lot of coastline, and people have to show up at any of these
#
designated places near the coastline.
#
And it's a swimming competition, and all the people who pass the swimming competition get
#
And his point was that they will do at least as well, at least in the first year.
#
Because, and then, obviously, second year, Kota will take over.
#
They will change the courses they teach.
#
They'll have swimming courses, and there'll be swimming pools everywhere, and there'll
#
be coaches and speedos on billboards and all of that.
#
So that will also be gamed.
#
That metric is also gone.
#
But I found, I think he was being provocative, and he comes up with great thought experiments,
#
And my initial thinking was that, yeah, this is actually going to get better results, because
#
it will test for hunger.
#
You know, at least in the first year, it will test for hunger.
#
And obviously, you will lose out some random geek who has true interest in the subject,
#
and, you know, can't swim.
#
But you're probably losing that kid anyway, you know, within the mechanized kind of system
#
which we have right now.
#
What are sort of your thoughts on that?
#
Do you think that what a system selects for then determines what the system produces,
#
Because this whole chain of events is just profoundly broken.
#
Sure, we are sorting, but what are we selecting for, and what are we producing?
#
Yeah, I agree with you.
#
I remember a similar question that I came across.
#
So I mentioned this professor in my, in Bits Pilani days, his name is Suresh Ramaswamy.
#
He's no more, actually.
#
So he was working with us on, because it was the first year the institute began in Goa,
#
and we were in a committee called the Constitution Making Body Committee for the Bits Pilani.
#
So we are going to write the student's constitution for the, like, how general election should
#
be held, what is the role of a president, vice president, treasurer, and so on, right?
#
And we are, we were this committee members, and then we were thinking about this situation,
#
what happens when there is a tie?
#
Like, what happens when two people get equal number of votes for a president or any other
#
So there were this lot of these suggestions from others in the committee who said that,
#
okay, let's put CGPA as a tiebreaker.
#
And that time, I remember the professor questioning us, why should CGPA be a tiebreaker?
#
Why can't it be height of a person?
#
You know, and I felt, you know, that was a very small random question asked in one of
#
the random days I spent in college, and it has stayed with me.
#
And that's what I said teachers can do, right?
#
Question things that it changes your mind forever.
#
Like, why should always be CGPA the better thing that decides the person is good or not,
#
And that too, he was right.
#
You are asking people to be a president of the student's body or vice president.
#
Why should his CGPA matter?
#
And you know what I would do?
#
Not only do I agree with this question, I would pick the shorter person.
#
And the reason I would pick the shorter person is that people have a hardwired bias to look
#
for tall people as the leaders.
#
So if a short person got an equal number of votes, that means on every other parameter,
#
And therefore, I would pick the shorter person.
#
That's a very interesting thought.
#
We are all hardwired to believe always the taller ones are better.
#
So and the question is, is this right?
#
He meant to say that CGPA can be as random to being a president as height can be.
#
That's what he meant to be.
#
So the same is the question with IIT entrances or any entrance examination.
#
Whom are we trying to select?
#
What is the outcome of the process?
#
What about the rest of the people who have not got into the system?
#
Then what are the outcomes, right?
#
This is something that we really need to understand as a society.
#
And then question like, then how can it be made better?
#
Okay, we have made the tests better.
#
We have made the questions harder.
#
We have made the filtering even higher and higher.
#
But then what about the other aspects of students that we are missing?
#
That is not captured in the exam.
#
Which are also equally important for them to be shining as innovators,
#
as people who can contribute to the society, as people who can also come back to academia
#
and then also contribute to further learning.
#
And how do we know that whether we have achieved this or not?
#
I feel that we have to do a lot of research on these things.
#
And then, so for instance, there was this PhD student who was trying to understand that,
#
okay, there is this in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu,
#
they have their own way of doing counseling where they put ranks for each student.
#
And then based on your ranks, you go into different colleges.
#
Then has the government ever studied what happens when you sort these students by ranks
#
and they go into different colleges?
#
What happens to their future outcomes?
#
How much of it is because I'm an IITN and how much of it is not because I'm truly above IITN?
#
I have my own ability that is leading to some outcomes.
#
How do we separate these two things?
#
Have we really studied?
#
I have really not seen these kind of studies done in the case of India.
#
But out and out, studies in US have shown how sorting into schools, certain type of schools,
#
certain type of universities, even the Ivy League institutions,
#
what kind of outcomes do they have for the students and what kind of inequality
#
does it reduces the inequality or it just makes the inequality even more in the society.
#
These are some things we don't study at all in our case.
#
And it's really important we delve into these things and then think about,
#
keep innovating and keep thinking about what are the other things that you can make,
#
that you can include to make the entrance examinations better,
#
to make the selection processes better.
#
But right now, I think for every other case, so even for social sciences and
#
other kind of disciplines as well, we are going in the same direction as IIT entrance exam.
#
Think of common university entrance examinations that has come up for
#
central universities and all that.
#
Again, it's the same multiple choice questions.
#
Do you really want to select a person going to do sociology or history or geography
#
by the multiple choice questions that they are able to answer?
#
Don't you want them to have a different set of skills?
#
Or is it that in the beginning year, you make students to learn different courses,
#
then allow them to make choices later in life?
#
Should we keep innovating around that?
#
Because even if some students know that they want to learn geography,
#
if you ask many other students in the universities, why did they end up taking?
#
Ma'am, I wanted to get into a central university or IIT.
#
This is a course that I got, so I ended up here.
#
Why did you do economics?
#
Why did you do history?
#
This is what I got, so I ended up here.
#
Don't you want them to at least explore in their first year and then decide their course later?
#
There should be some flexibility with all these things.
#
People say that the new education policies will bring some of these flexibilities,
#
but again, when you want to bring changes, the way the system approaches this,
#
what are your selection processes for the system?
#
All these also have to get revamped, right?
#
It's not like you just change, you can now go out in two years, three years,
#
you can select what you, that's fine.
#
But then the examinations are going to be the same,
#
the selection processes are continuing to be the same.
#
You should bring innovation throughout the system.
#
And we can always take baby steps.
#
Experiment with things that you can change, like for instance,
#
should you always have internals 20%, this 20%, that 40%, or do you want to innovate in that?
#
Do you want to change your way you want to test?
#
Even the current students, do you want to change that?
#
Bring these small, small changes and try to innovate within the change.
#
I'm not saying no institution is doing this.
#
Some institutions are trying this, but most institutions are not trying these changes,
#
which they can do within their university itself.
#
And then there is a whole set of next level of policies on
#
how you can make changes at a more higher level.
#
Like policy change, educational policy changes, so that what kind of students you filter,
#
what, how do you want to go about doing them and so on.
#
The autonomy and also not tying funding to that autonomy, right?
#
Is, so for instance, I give you so many funds,
#
so then you have to do these things in this way only.
#
That's not how we should approach.
#
This is the funding I will give you, but you show me research,
#
you show me not in quantity of students,
#
but the quality that you are trying to get to.
#
That is more important for me.
#
Change the parameters by which you evaluate the universities,
#
then automatically things will also be moving around that.
#
So here's something I've thought about in a shallow way.
#
And let me know what you obviously thought about it much deeper,
#
kind of the question you asked that once you do that sorting,
#
what are the outcomes after that?
#
And it is obvious to everyone that anyone who goes to Harvard
#
will do much better in life than somebody
#
who goes to a much smaller university.
#
Number of reasons for that.
#
One reason is that it's much harder to get in.
#
So there's a selection effect that just to get in,
#
you have to be brighter than the rest
#
and more privileged than the rest actually,
#
because it's not just merit,
#
it's also networks and donors and all that.
#
A second factor is a signaling effect that the Harvard brand name itself
#
will take you a couple of steps ahead of a random small college.
#
And then there is, of course, the networks of people you are with,
#
because everybody who is your classmate today
#
will be a CEO 20 years later and et cetera, et cetera.
#
And the power of those networks also helps a lot.
#
And I think that there is,
#
and it doesn't matter which of these is bigger.
#
I think there is something profoundly broken,
#
because when I think about, for example,
#
what markets have done for us,
#
especially after liberalization or what free markets
#
have gotten you everywhere,
#
is that everybody can have the basic things of life.
#
Everybody in India can buy salt.
#
There is no entrance test.
#
You don't have to go to quota to study for two years
#
to buy salt or potato chips.
#
Anybody wants it, they can have it.
#
And equally, in my head,
#
I think that although we have normalized the fact
#
that there is a scarcity of supply,
#
and therefore there is this huge demand for a few quality seats
#
and the quality education that there is,
#
my brain just, like for me,
#
the utopian world I see is where everybody can study
#
what the hell they want to.
#
You want to study math, you study math.
#
I want to study engineering, I study engineering.
#
What is this entrance test where I'm jumping through hoops
#
and there are metrics which can be gamed
#
and I have to give this common entrance
#
and eventually the course I do
#
is a course I happen to get into
#
and not necessarily the one I want.
#
And I'm trying to imagine that what is a barrier
#
to this fantasy landscape that I see in my head?
#
Is it possible or am I dreaming?
#
Like, where has the system failed us?
#
I can go to walk into a supermarket
#
and I can get 40 brands of shampoo
#
and anybody can walk into that supermarket.
#
And most of us can afford to buy salt, for example,
#
or if you want a particular kind of soap, you can.
#
But when it comes to education, the scarcity is crazy
#
and the inequality will obviously deepen and deepen and deepen
#
because of all these sort of the way the system is structured.
#
But Amit, the thing is in the, so for instance,
#
I'll give you the, I've been in campus placements for four years
#
and then the signaling effect is very strong here
#
and especially in the Indian job market.
#
If you see this, like the corporates that they come
#
and recruit from the student pool,
#
they say that, okay, you are a category A institute,
#
so your package is 20 lakh.
#
I've talked to, you know, really like head of heads
#
in different businesses and then they say that,
#
ma'am, but you are a category B institute,
#
so your institute will give this.
#
Your category A institute will get a 20 lakh package.
#
Category B institute will get a 12 lakh package.
#
So he was trying to say that, but I said that,
#
but you're recruiting both of them for the same role.
#
How does it matter that whether I'm category A or category B?
#
If the students pass your interviews and everything,
#
they should get the same jobs
#
unless you find that one has done much better than the other.
#
They're like, no, ma'am, when we get businesses from clients,
#
we show that we have this many IIT graduates
#
and IM graduates in our team
#
I'm able to get this much of funding for that project.
#
If I show I have all these people from local colleges sitting,
#
they will give me only, you know,
#
half the money that they've paid for the project.
#
So this whole thing is like, you know, it is definitely.
#
So in this case, everybody can get the education
#
and everybody can get these courses
#
that they want to do these days.
#
But then the problem is your entry to the job market
#
is so, so, so circuitous.
#
And this is because again, we have job problems, job situation.
#
Wherever the scarcity you are going to,
#
and it's actually rational for people to insist on IIT people
#
because you don't have the ability to test every person that deeply.
#
Yeah, it's just a proxy that I'm going to use.
#
They clear, they got the same marks,
#
but an IIT brand will get this much package,
#
but this brand will get this much package.
#
I've clearly heard it from same job, same role.
#
Everybody works in the same team.
#
Students have come to me later and said that ma'am, you know what,
#
I have got this, I have got this much package,
#
but same person, he's getting this just because he's from an IIM
#
You know, that's definitely there.
#
And then, okay, I do all these courses.
#
I develop myself and then do what,
#
but then which office when I apply for jobs, who will consider me?
#
How do you show for the same job you're having 100 of people?
#
And then I would always go by the easiest thing.
#
Okay, go by the top college, take the top 10 colleges.
#
First filter this, there should be some filter that I put.
#
And then finally I said, okay,
#
let me interview these top five people out of this, right?
#
So that's why it's, and the problem is again,
#
because we are only, the way we are training students,
#
we are training them to go and be doing some job
#
rather than training them to think independently,
#
come up with a job or be like,
#
that's why we have very low number of entrepreneurs
#
compared to other places, right?
#
Less number of entrepreneurs who can start on this system.
#
And then when you talk of entrepreneurship,
#
there are other kinds of issues like,
#
you know, our own EV grantee once told me that,
#
you won't believe that I wanted to start my business in Mumbai,
#
but then that place is so horrible for me to start a business,
#
the number of permits and things that I have to get done
#
from the Maharashtra government.
#
It was so hard for me to survive there.
#
So finally I moved to Bangalore
#
just to get my permits to start my business,
#
though all my sales is in Maharashtra.
#
So he was, I'm just saying that from his experience.
#
So he's saying that, and then the number of things
#
I have to get done to start my company is just enormous.
#
And which 21, 22 year old is going to go through,
#
how many of them can go through that?
#
Unless your parents are rich enough and they say,
#
you go and experiment and do whatever you want.
#
And, you know, do, we have no pressure on you to earn
#
and to earn and give to the family and all that.
#
Nobody's going to try that.
#
When I started Amit, I didn't have the luxury
#
to go and start think about what is the job
#
that I'm going to, I want to be in, right?
#
I just had to, my whole thing was I had to find a job.
#
And then I will see later, right?
#
So it's always, most of the times it's like that.
#
First, let me find a job.
#
First, let me earn something and give to my family
#
How many of them have the privilege to, you know,
#
think about this and the risk and that's the reason
#
why do many South Indians think that you either can,
#
I mean, things are changing now, but even now,
#
like you can either be an engineer or a doctor.
#
Why? Because that's the thing that gives an assurance
#
that you can earn something, right?
#
And then you do whatever you want.
#
First, do your engineering and then do whatever you want.
#
So I once advised one of the parents,
#
if your son is interested in math,
#
why don't you try math or statistics or disciplines?
#
And I recommended a lot of these institutions are there.
#
Even a government, central government run good institutions,
#
very good institutions are there for mathematics.
#
And then she's like, but you know, if I had two sons,
#
I will send one to engineering and one to mathematics.
#
But I have only one son.
#
I cannot take a gamble with one son.
#
So I will send him to engineering only.
#
So it's like, I was surprised.
#
You know, you remember in those very old days,
#
people used to sell, tell if I have four sons,
#
I will send one to military, right?
#
Like, because they know that you can sacrifice
#
one of the sons for the country.
#
That's how the parent was telling me, like, okay,
#
this is how they think.
#
They don't want to take that risk.
#
And then I think as Indians,
#
we have a very less preference for risk.
#
We are less risk loving than,
#
we want more stable assured things.
#
And then we will see after this, okay, first you get married,
#
first let have at least once,
#
and then you do whatever you want in life.
#
And then there is nothing to add,
#
nothing else you can do in your life after that,
#
because you are just bound by all these things, right?
#
So that said, it's so long route you have to take.
#
And it's very hard for people from small towns
#
and villages to think of this route even.
#
If you can't find a job, especially boys,
#
if they are not able to find a job,
#
I mean, the kind of things they have to go through,
#
the pressure they have to go through
#
from the society is just enormous.
#
So you mentioned that, you mentioned the term EV grantee.
#
So for the sake of the listeners by EV,
#
we mean Emergent Ventures,
#
which our friend Shruti Rajgopalan runs.
#
And that's how we first met, in fact, at an EV conference.
#
I want to think aloud a little bit about,
#
why the risk appetite is so low
#
and why so few people want to be entrepreneurs
#
And I see two broad categories of reasons.
#
And one broad category of reason is what you mentioned,
#
that the business environment is not conducive for that.
#
You have to jump through so many hoops
#
to start a business here.
#
You need so many licenses.
#
You have to bribe so many people.
#
The friction is insane.
#
And that becomes a tremendous disincentive
#
for anyone wanting to start a business here.
#
The second category of reason
#
is this really broad umbrella category of mindset,
#
we are a country where most people have grown up
#
in tremendous scarcity.
#
We're still a very poor country.
#
So obviously you want the sure thing.
#
You want your first son to be an engineer.
#
And then maybe you gamble with the second one,
#
ki theek hai beta math karo, you know?
#
And et cetera, et cetera.
#
where some of the risk aversion comes from.
#
The risk aversion, of course,
#
is hardwired into all of us anyway.
#
And another factor that may play a part is,
#
like Jagdish Bhagwati once made the observation
#
that China has a profit-seeking mentality.
#
India has a rent-seeking mentality.
#
And me and an economist friend of mine
#
called Kumar Ranand were once thinking about this
#
and thinking that should we write a piece?
#
Because our thesis was that
#
we have that rent-seeking mentality,
#
not because it is something fundamental
#
in our culture, in Indian culture,
#
but because of the institutions we adopted
#
after independence that we adopted.
#
This very statist way of governing
#
where the state controls everything.
#
And for many of the decades after independence,
#
if private players play a part,
#
it is as cronies and through the state.
#
And therefore, the only way to do well
#
is to be part of the state
#
or to align with the state
#
and rent-seek and exploit others.
#
And that also becomes a kind of a default mindset.
#
And these mindsets which are trapped in the past,
#
the mindset of, you know,
#
the UPSC being top of the tree, for example,
#
and I mean, now it's changing in the cities perhaps,
#
or the mindset of risk aversion,
#
so engineer bano, medical bano, etc, etc.
#
Do you see in your experience,
#
because you've been teaching young people for so long,
#
do you see in your experience that mindset changing?
#
And if so, at what kind of pace
#
and what are the factors that make it change?
#
Because I would imagine like in a city like Bengaluru,
#
there is the possibility of, you know,
#
a virtuous cycle being created
#
because you're surrounded by other entrepreneurs
#
and young people who are taking risks.
#
A lot of diversity also, right?
#
So what are your thoughts?
#
Definitely, Bengaluru is one of the amazing cities
#
that I've seen that, you know,
#
a lot of young people coming up with great ideas
#
and coming up with great solutions, innovative things,
#
even among another Emergent Ventures grantee
#
actually has this cycle app,
#
so where they have put cycles in different communities.
#
This is Deepak Vyas who I quoted.
#
Yeah, okay, sorry, I keep forgetting.
#
I didn't realize, I completely escaped my mind
#
that I don't yet you know him.
#
I met him and then he was talking about these cycles
#
and then I said, yeah, we have it in our community.
#
Then he was like, can you give me a feedback
#
about the cycles, the app, how did it work or not and so on.
#
So you have this very great ecosystem in Bengaluru
#
and which attracts, keep attracting a lot of youngsters.
#
But then going back to this mindset, this thing,
#
that's where it's very limited to people who can take,
#
who are the parents who now think
#
that I don't have to rely on my son's income
#
for my retirement, right?
#
I have saved enough for my retirement.
#
I can take care of my life.
#
So my child can go and explore anything.
#
So, you know, that is where the mindset change is happening,
#
right, I would say is like a bit of upper middle class
#
and also in cities like Bengaluru.
#
In traditional towns and villages,
#
it's still like a big struggle to even get to a good place
#
and then see and then always see the first job
#
is always something that you want to be assured
#
that you have now got a job.
#
You've proven to the society that I can, you know,
#
get a job and then I can earn on my own
#
and then you start thinking about,
#
okay, now I don't like this job and then now what do I do?
#
So by the time they come to that situation,
#
I was talking to this one of the small
#
and medium enterprise owners,
#
one of the projects we are doing
#
with the micro, small and medium enterprise owners.
#
So they say that by the time the youth have this realization
#
and they come, they are already in the late 30s
#
and they have the pressure of marriage
#
and everything else from the society as well.
#
I think by all these processes that you,
#
okay, you want to become an entrepreneur,
#
you still finish your college education.
#
I mean, it has nothing to do with your,
#
whatever work that you want to do
#
or whatever you want to be,
#
but still just have a degree, beta,
#
because finally when I want you,
#
when you get into marriage,
#
people ask what degree or company
#
whether you have a degree or not.
#
So these things, you take a very long process
#
and I think 20s are the right place to explore,
#
And I mean, what are the things that I can,
#
when I think about my life,
#
what are the things that we have done in 20s?
#
I just didn't, if you ask me like,
#
will you change your discipline from economics
#
to biology or whatever,
#
I'm like, I will think,
#
I will just make a big list of benefits and risks.
#
And then I weigh in on the scale
#
that I take hundreds of opinions from people.
#
And then, yeah, I'm taking an informed decision,
#
that risk appetite goes down with my age, right?
#
And if you think too much, also like,
#
it's not also like you end up taking
#
even suboptimal decisions.
#
So you put in all these things
#
that you finish your studies,
#
you finish your college,
#
you try go to a better college
#
and do your masters again.
#
And then by the time you come,
#
it's like, okay, game over, beta.
#
Now you have to do something with your life.
#
So that is where I say that,
#
you give this little freedom to explore,
#
even as young as adolescents,
#
allow our children to explore,
#
and then come back to studies if they want to,
#
or they want to work somewhere,
#
let them work somewhere
#
and then explore and come back.
#
This is very, very less, right?
#
This is still not happening much in India.
#
I would say that that is the age
#
where you get a lot more realization
#
and think about, okay, what I like
#
You start articulating things.
#
That is very important, I feel.
#
And this mindset change is happening,
#
where retirement is taken care of.
#
most of the times it is parents
#
are still dependent on their children
#
for their retired life.
#
we don't have the concept of retirement.
#
In India, it's like just
#
you move from one stage of life
#
to another stage of life.
#
Hardly people save for retirement.
#
Even among the most educated people,
#
What are you talking about?
#
That's how they think of it.
#
Have you started your retirement savings?
#
You should start your retirement savings
#
as soon as you start working in life.
#
That's totally absent in India.
#
So once that is taken care of
#
and you are no more dependent
#
then you give them more freedom.
#
You give them more access.
#
Then you allow them to explore further
#
a few years of risk in life.
#
slowly will come as we become
#
more and more independent
#
for our own old age thing.
#
The second thing I see is
#
how places like Bangalore
#
is different from Chennai
#
That entrepreneurial hub
#
or that initial mass momentum
#
that you need is built in Bangalore,
#
which is not happening in other cities
#
Then we have to think about
#
which is different from other cities.
#
How do we then bring that
#
innovation culture in other cities as well
#
or entrepreneurial culture
#
in other cities as well?
#
What are the things that the government
#
or any other this thing can do
#
to promote this kind of entrepreneurship?
#
So that hub is also needed
#
because if I have to start a business,
#
either my parents should tell me
#
because it comes through my family
#
that this is the gems business
#
I'm in that for a long time
#
we've been running this business
#
and I know the suppliers,
#
I should procure raw materials.
#
Everything is sorted off, right?
#
But if you're starting new,
#
you need to figure out everybody, right?
#
Like, for instance, again,
#
caste has a very big role in Indian society.
#
micro, small and medium enterprises place,
#
if you want to start a business,
#
I'm talking about manufacturing units
#
It's a big exporting hub.
#
Now, if an outside caste person has to come,
#
who will give him credit,
#
who will supply the raw materials to him,
#
who will buy the brand products for him,
#
everything has to be figured out, right?
#
this ecosystem is very much lagging
#
unless you had somebody in somebody,
#
that's where Bangalore is very different.
#
I feel that youngsters can come in,
#
they learn how to set up shops.
#
I have somebody to mentor me to tell me,
#
hey, you have to go and do this,
#
This is where you approach, right?
#
the kind of rental agreements you have to make,
#
everything is important.
#
Everything plays an important part in your business.
#
And that is where you need people
#
whom you can look up to,
#
whom you can ask questions,
#
from whom you can take mentorship and so on, right?
#
And then take this forward.
#
And that is very thriving in Bangalore, I feel.
#
And I hope really there are more cities that come up
#
because this one Bangalore is not enough
#
to accommodate all the youth entrepreneurs
#
that we have in our country.
#
We need to have this kind of a culture
#
in other places set up too.
#
But that doesn't still make,
#
I would say Bangalore a very great place
#
because it still has its own public infrastructure issues,
#
be it water or electricity or roads,
#
there are all sorts of problems.
#
And because of entrepreneurs,
#
we have this very innovative private solutions
#
to public problems, I would call it.
#
I feel the government can do much more
#
and it would even thrive even further.
#
Yeah, I mean, you know,
#
and urbanization in general,
#
not just Bangalore, urbanization in general
#
sort of changes the incentives of people
#
because they are in larger economic networks
#
where often for self-interest,
#
they have to discriminate less and etc, etc.
#
And you have more resources available to you in every way.
#
You know, urbanization in general
#
is a damn good thing for a society
#
and Bangalore in particular has sorted many things out.
#
Though as a guest of mine last week,
#
Malini Goel correctly pointed out,
#
she said that if you look at the hardware
#
and software of Bangalore,
#
the software is 5G, the hardware is 2G.
#
And by hardware, of course,
#
referring to all this creaking public infrastructure
#
I have a final question about mindset
#
before I go back to your own journey,
#
which is that, you know, when you teach young people,
#
like you referred earlier that as a student,
#
you met so many teachers
#
who made such a huge impact in your life
#
and perhaps helped shape the direction of it.
#
But as a teacher, are you able to bring about
#
those kinds of mindset shifts within your students
#
or are most of them, you know,
#
just prisoners of the part dependence
#
of what the circumstances are?
#
So I come across students who come and say
#
that, ma'am, I'm really interested in doing this and so on.
#
and these are the things that you have to do
#
if you want to take this path.
#
But, you know, they give into that pressure,
#
Forget they ask now, unlike in our days,
#
I feel they are able to withstand the pressure
#
from their parents, right?
#
They are, they are able to resist that
#
or they are even able to oppose that pressure
#
that, you know, you have to,
#
the way parents dictate that this is the path
#
you have to follow or something.
#
But the peer pressure is still there, right?
#
Like, so I have the students who come and say that,
#
ma'am, I know that this job won't help me to get tiered.
#
I know that this will not, is not useful to me.
#
But still I will have this job
#
so that I don't feel pressured
#
that I'm doing something very, you know,
#
the risk mindset that we were talking about.
#
so you waste one semester
#
just looking and scouting for this job.
#
That's a precious amount of time you waste.
#
Then the next semester they say that,
#
yeah, let me take this job.
#
Let me just earn one or two years and save money
#
and then think of a route about going.
#
I mean, you're just wasting more and more time.
#
And I told them that this is not how it works.
#
When you, if you, if you're sure,
#
if you're really like it, at least try it.
#
Even if you fail, it's fine.
#
And they, sometimes they say it's the parents
#
or the family is not in a good situation.
#
They need to send money and other things.
#
But most of the times they,
#
it is like they would say,
#
yes, ma'am, but then I don't want,
#
I don't want to be like, be alone on this.
#
Let me be, let me do something and see if I can,
#
if I like this job, then I'll come back to it.
#
They're not very clear or very, or like strong will.
#
You really need that strong will to go and pursue this.
#
Take those risks in life.
#
That said, even I was not like,
#
I had to choose when I chose from one institution
#
At least I knew that I will not end up being jobless
#
So, you know, it's not like I took 100% risk,
#
though I changed disciplines and then,
#
you know, people around me were questioning,
#
are you sure you know what you want
#
or you're just jumping things
#
or just passing away some time in your life
#
or something like that.
#
So, yeah, this, I, I see that changing in some people,
#
in some people, but still, it's not like a majority.
#
I would still say they are in minority
#
and that struggle is a little bit a lonely struggle
#
that they have to take.
#
Especially in these non-elite institutions,
#
elite institutions, the struggle is a lot more.
#
And to think out of the box or to think something
#
very different from how your,
#
how your peer network is thinking is a very difficult journey.
#
On top of it, added to this, you have these distractions
#
and, you know, from social media
#
and you have all these, you're going again,
#
you're going for this quick, quick,
#
very momentary things, right?
#
And this is so much influenced by the social media
#
that they are in, the networks they are in and so on.
#
Lot more distractions than I think in the olden times
#
and this is where, you know, if people are able to,
#
there's this very beautiful article by Tyler Cowen
#
where he argues about, you know, work.
#
And he says that, you know, if people are able
#
to distinguish between the momentary pleasures
#
that they get from the life satisfaction that they derive,
#
that is when you know where, okay,
#
that is when I know that I'm after, what am I after,
#
these momentary immediate pressures that I get
#
or this life satisfaction that I'm after,
#
which will take a longer or a harder journey, right?
#
Those are those people who will be able to say that,
#
okay, I know this is going to be hard.
#
I know this is going to be long,
#
but I know that at the end of it,
#
I'll have more satisfaction than doing anything else, right?
#
That is very, very important.
#
That understanding is very important.
#
And it also depends how long it takes to come to your,
#
to that kind of an understanding in life.
#
I think what happens is that our brains
#
are wired for immediate gratification.
#
And, you know, to, and those are lovely phrases by Tyler.
#
I'm going to hunt out the piece
#
and I'll also link it from the show notes.
#
And the thing is, that kind of deeper satisfaction
#
that you get over life, it comes from habits
#
that are not pleasurable in the present moment.
#
Like I know that sitting and reading something,
#
reading a book that will give me some kind of knowledge
#
or sitting and doing some writing
#
and putting in the hard work.
#
In the present, it is painful.
#
It takes cognitive energy, concentration.
#
It takes a lot of discipline,
#
but it makes my future self smarter.
#
Whereas a lot of other things I could do,
#
like playing Candy Crush or online chess
#
or just swiping, swiping and watching Reels for two hours.
#
In the present, it's pleasant.
#
You know, dopamine hits are happening one after the other.
#
But they make my future self stupider
#
than my future self would be,
#
if you consider opportunity cost.
#
And because our brains are wired for immediate gratification,
#
and this is not a criticism of others,
#
it is a confession that I will often just find myself
#
doing something that I know is nonsensical.
#
But it's almost as if, you know,
#
I'm unable to fight my lizard self as it were.
#
You mentioned crazy 20s.
#
So I'm going to ask you about your crazy 20s.
#
In the sense, I'm very curious about the career trajectory
#
which took you from BITS to IIT Madras
#
to IGIDR and which made you shift
#
from engineering to economics
#
because it's a madly drastic shift.
#
If you are an engineer, you've pretty much,
#
you know, got it easy, got it made, etc, etc.
#
It's a conventional way of looking at it.
#
And economics just opens up, you know,
#
it's like an unseen vista.
#
But before you talk about that particular shift,
#
since I think you use the phrase crazy 20s,
#
what is the craziest thing you have ever done?
#
So I am not a sports person at all.
#
I've done yoga because my father
#
always insisted on doing yoga.
#
He thought that will give me concentration
#
and which will make me better in my studies.
#
But I've always, I've been trained in yoga,
#
but I've not been a sports person or so,
#
except for playing with my cousins or so on.
#
So then, but I did this crazy thing in 20,
#
I'm running this Mumbai marathon.
#
I thought it was a very crazy thing to do
#
because I've never run a marathon in life.
#
Already I forget to run a marathon.
#
I've never even run 100 meters race in my life.
#
Why would I run a marathon, which is like,
#
so first I run 21 kilometers
#
and the next year I immediately enroll for 42 kilometers.
#
So that's the crazy things that I'm talking about.
#
Like, you say, okay, why not?
#
It's crazy because you have not trained enough for it.
#
You have never run the entire 20 kilometers.
#
You've never even tried before.
#
And the maximum I've run is eight kilometers
#
And then this one fine day I go
#
and then I stand with the Mumbai crowd
#
and they are all so, so nice, right?
#
They keep giving this encouragement
#
and then say, come on, come on, you can finish it.
#
And then I finished those 21 kilometers.
#
I'm like, I can't believe myself.
#
I actually did this thing in 25.
#
But if I had not done it in 25,
#
I don't think I would have done this sort of crazy thing now.
#
So, you know, that is what I'm talking.
#
It can be anything in life, that crazy thing
#
that you try in those 20s,
#
can influence your life for the rest of the things
#
because you build up then, then you understand that,
#
yeah, you can run a marathon.
#
So, you know, you continue to do that.
#
Maybe you continue to do that for the rest of your life.
#
And that's one way to keep yourself healthy too
#
in the later part of life.
#
Because you're running, now you need to practice.
#
You need to be like at least doing this training
#
before you run a marathon, right?
#
And so you try that, try that.
#
That's one of the things.
#
Another crazy thing is just is marrying my husband.
#
Because you won't believe we had a one or two years of struggle
#
to convince our parents to get a yes from our parents.
#
We are from different communities.
#
Caste was a big thing then.
#
And then, oh, the emotional thing we had to go through,
#
dramas that we had to go through to finally get married.
#
I am like, why did I even,
#
when I think back of those things,
#
I don't know how I had that mindset.
#
So this was middle of my PhD.
#
Then I was fighting with my parents
#
to get a yes to marry this person.
#
Then all after a year or so,
#
all of a sudden my parents come and say,
#
okay, everybody now knows about your love story.
#
We don't want to delay things.
#
We want you to get married immediately, right?
#
I'm doing my, I finished my two chapters
#
and I'm writing my third chapter.
#
And then they said, no, now you're getting married.
#
Now you should listen to what we are saying this.
#
And then I get married in the middle of my PhD.
#
And I shipped from Mumbai to Chennai.
#
I take up a teaching, full-time teaching job.
#
all this while doing my PhD.
#
When I think of those years,
#
I went through a lot during those years.
#
And my pregnancy was not easy.
#
My first pregnancy was so difficult.
#
I was throwing up all nine months.
#
It was throwing up whatever I ate all the nine months.
#
It wouldn't stop at all.
#
And I was so drained of teaching the whole day.
#
And then I had to do my PhD and also do my thesis,
#
complete my thesis work.
#
And then, and it went on.
#
Finally, I remember when I completed,
#
when I submitted my PhD,
#
The defense was supposed to be early in the morning,
#
but my external examiner's flight got delayed.
#
And so she ended up reaching late in the evening.
#
And I had scheduled to come back,
#
to fly back to Chennai the same day,
#
because at that time I was breastfeeding my son.
#
So I came back right after my defense.
#
I did not even say to give a dinner party
#
or to host a dinner for my colleagues
#
and professors and so on.
#
I just came back in that night.
#
And then I had to breastfeed my son.
#
And then that was done.
#
So the amount of crazy things
#
that I've done in those years,
#
in this late 20s is just unimaginable.
#
If you ask me now, I will say no,
#
I will never do it to this way.
#
It really took a lot of mental energy
#
and also like willpower
#
and also the mental bandwidth it consumed
#
to do all these things simultaneously.
#
I have never been on my own in an independent way.
#
So I had to learn to run a family.
#
I had to learn to be in a marriage,
#
be in a new city, be in a new job.
#
I've never worked before.
#
And I also had to parent my son.
#
So no, that's the crazy things.
#
That's the kind of crazy things
#
I've done in my late 20s,
#
which I won't do it again.
#
I want to double click on both of these
#
before we get to the journey.
#
And I'll double click on the second one first
#
that there will be all these productivity books
#
which will tell you how to make
#
different chunks of time for your work
#
And they're mostly great for men.
#
But for women where you're juggling
#
a bunch of different things
#
and you're constantly moving
#
from one mode to the other,
#
it's incredibly difficult.
#
And how did you sort of then arrive
#
at the disciplines required to do this?
#
Just a willpower to shift concentration
#
from one thing to the other.
#
I have an incredibly privileged life
#
where I have none of these responsibilities.
#
And I find it so hard to get anything done,
#
to whatever it is I'm doing.
#
Is it just that you have taken on all these things,
#
you've got to do it anyway.
#
So you just battle your way through it
#
and you don't think about it.
#
Or do you eventually figure out a way
#
to put systems in place,
#
which take all of these constraints into account
#
and you're still able to do it.
#
What was that phase like?
#
Because there must have been times
#
where you said that man with all this happening,
#
there's a kid, there's a new city.
#
Should I give up the PhD?
#
Or maybe at times you think that
#
do I need to do the job?
#
Why did I get married and shift?
#
But in the end you do it all.
#
You know, so what was the...
#
I think the Majburi thing works for some people,
#
but the problem is, Amit,
#
there's so much of mental drain in that, right?
#
I mean, at the end of the day,
#
you're just waiting for getting things to be done.
#
The second approach would be,
#
I would suggest is far better,
#
I mean, it's too much to take.
#
So what you do is, okay,
#
tell yourself that I will take this very slowly
#
and I will do this, prioritize this fast, right?
#
Like then you slowly start putting processes
#
Like, and that's where I think my husband was very helpful.
#
What do you want to do today?
#
Do you want this or do you want to do that?
#
And then you do put everything in that
#
and keep the rest of the thing to the next week.
#
Even if your PhD gets delayed further or something.
#
Just try to prioritize and then not worry about,
#
this is one thing that I should really give credit to my husband
#
if you have decided this is what you want,
#
then just don't worry about the things that have not happened, right?
#
Or the things that would have been done in a better way.
#
Just be happy that you were able to do this, right?
#
So then you start thinking, okay,
#
this is what I want to outsource.
#
This is what I want to do myself, right?
#
This is something I want to keep in myself.
#
Or things like, at least try, okay,
#
let me be not very hard upon myself.
#
Just say that even if I can manage one hour,
#
at least four days in a week,
#
then I should be happy.
#
Then you slowly start increasing it.
#
Okay, if I'm able to do four hours consistently every week,
#
can I make it to five hours?
#
Can I make it to six hours, right?
#
Then I think once you start thinking through these processes,
#
that's when you will start understanding
#
and making sense of things.
#
there will be times where you will break down.
#
You will have to take a break.
#
Take those few days break.
#
And then come back to it, right?
#
And then come back with a fresh mind.
#
That is very, very important, I feel.
#
You are bound to fail in some days.
#
Not like in the longer term,
#
but in the short term, you're bound to fail on some of the days.
#
There are days when, for instance,
#
having this first baby is very crazy, right?
#
Like all of a sudden in the middle of the night,
#
your son is throwing up
#
and then you take them to the emergency.
#
Or sometimes they get fever
#
and then you can't put your mind to anything.
#
You cannot put your mind to your PhD thesis
#
because it's your first baby.
#
You don't know a lot of things.
#
And then so you just take those two, three days off
#
and then focus till your baby is fine,
#
till you're mentally fine and then come back to work.
#
So these are some of the things that we have to keep trying.
#
Every life is different.
#
So we have to try different processes.
#
And the support systems are really, really important.
#
I had a very flexible work environment.
#
So I feed my son and then I go to work
#
and then I come back for lunch.
#
I stayed near the institute.
#
So I come back for lunch.
#
I feed my son, breastfeed my son,
#
then I again go back to work.
#
So I do this multiple rounds in a day,
#
taking my bike to and fro to work.
#
And then the institute never questioned me.
#
Why are you going like 10 times in a day up and down?
#
As long as I'm able to get this work done.
#
That is the kind of workplace you need, right?
#
As long as you are able to get things done.
#
It doesn't matter whether you come 10 times to office
#
or you're just there showing your face for nine hours or 10 hours.
#
So that kind of micromanagement was not there.
#
So that is a support system.
#
My parents and in-laws, they understood later,
#
very later, they understood how much it is to do a PhD
#
and they started helping us as well.
#
So that's another support system.
#
And then, of course, your life partner,
#
that's the most important person in your life.
#
To put some, when things go really crazy,
#
to put some rationality in your mind.
#
You still are not a bad mother.
#
You still are not a bad wife.
#
Whatever happens, everything is fine, right?
#
So that support systems are important.
#
So one is how you discipline yourself.
#
And the second thing is how you,
#
how the kind of support system you have.
#
I feel both these things, right?
#
Thinking through the processes
#
as well as the support systems are important,
#
Tell me about the running.
#
Like, how did you get into running?
#
What did you like about it?
#
Like, you know, what is it?
#
So, yeah, I really, the long distance running
#
And then I have this keep constantly jogging pace.
#
I'm just, I don't know if I'm even jogging or walking,
#
but I keep jogging and then I keep doing this, right?
#
There is, when you're doing this for a long distance,
#
when you're doing it for hours.
#
So I completed my full marathon,
#
like the 42 kilometers in five hours, 45 minutes or so, right?
#
Five hours or 45 minutes.
#
You're just, it's just your mind talking to your body, right?
#
After few, okay, the first two hours is fine.
#
You still are some of man age and then you run.
#
Mumbai heat, you can imagine the heat and the humidity.
#
The sun is up and then you start talking to your body.
#
Just one more step, one more step.
#
And then the last leg of the marathon is like,
#
no, the body is like, no, I won't do it.
#
Now for every inch that you want your body to move,
#
the mind has to work on it so much, so much.
#
It has to constantly tell the body,
#
come on, you can do it.
#
You will be able to finish.
#
That's all one more step, one more step and so on.
#
You keep talking to your body and then you understand that how,
#
what a big marvelous thing this is, right?
#
Lots of people have written on how your mind can control your body.
#
Body can actually listen to what you want to do.
#
And really I felt that during my marathon,
#
that was a very enriching, not finishing the marathon,
#
not that enriching experience that I can make,
#
I can actually make my body, you know, do what my mind says,
#
is a very, I would say a very new experience
#
that I have never felt anywhere.
#
And I'm telling you this because this helped me in my delivery,
#
in my first delivery, that was an equal marathon as well.
#
I had eight hours of labor pain.
#
And that marathon training is what I could remember.
#
That marathon that I ran,
#
the first marathon that I ran was the thing that I could remember.
#
Okay, I'm here, I'm here.
#
I just have to tell my body, yes, we have to relax.
#
You have to take deep breaths and then it will,
#
you are there, you are there.
#
And for eight hours of pain and then your baby is out.
#
Because now you're trained,
#
because your mind has become so strong
#
that it is able to now tell your body and control your pain
#
and bear with that pain and then be there, right?
#
The doctor came and asked, oh, you're in so much pain.
#
Do you want to take an epidural?
#
I'm like, no, I'm fine.
#
And then I did not want to take any kind of these pain relieving injections.
#
And I told them, no, I'll be completely fine.
#
That willpower came from my marathon training.
#
I would say that experience.
#
And this marathon I started because of my professors.
#
Again, there were two professors who were running marathons
#
and they saw me going to the gym one day.
#
And then they were like, oh, you are running.
#
Do you run in the gym and all?
#
They asked, yes, I do run sometimes.
#
They asked, how much do you run?
#
I'm like, I run about 10 minutes, 15 minutes.
#
They're like, why can't you try more, push it to more?
#
You know, you can even try five kilometers or 10 kilometer marathon.
#
And then they started talking me to it.
#
And then this really started motivating me.
#
They made sure that sometimes they would take me to the training
#
when they were running with the runners groups and all
#
in the Borivali National Park.
#
So we used to go to the Sanjay Gandhi National Park and run.
#
And they're like, OK, even if you do four kilometers today, it's fine.
#
And then like that, they tried to little bit, little bit push me.
#
And that's when I started taking it more seriously.
#
And once you run, I think you'll never get that
#
because that experience is something you will cherish.
#
Then after this, like recently, my husband and I ran for Cauvery Trail Marathon.
#
It was his first marathon as well.
#
Then one of my cousins have started running.
#
So, you know, it's so infectious.
#
This is something you learn that it's so nice
#
and you want others to feel it as well.
#
And that's how you spread it.
#
But I don't put pressure on others.
#
I'm like, you just try.
#
Even if you walk, it's fine.
#
It doesn't matter you run or not.
#
You just want to, you know, try this with your body.
#
See how much you can take it.
#
And that's all you have to do.
#
You don't have to go to the finish line.
#
And the good part of marathon is that is the crowd, right?
#
I would consider them as the support systems
#
because they're always encouraging.
#
They're like, come on, you're there.
#
It will be another 10 kilometers.
#
They'll say you're almost there.
#
And they will encourage you, come on, you can do it.
#
And then on the Mumbai, I remember on the Poddar road,
#
there were this people that just came down from their houses
#
and they're just distributing biscuits,
#
bananas and juice and everything.
#
Why should people do that?
#
That's so encouraging, right?
#
They just came from their homes to encourage runners.
#
And that's the best part of running a marathon
#
in cities like this where it's organized very well.
#
And you really enjoy it.
#
It's a very enjoyable experience.
#
I would really recommend to those people.
#
Who want to try running.
#
I loved your line about, you know,
#
where you'll tell people to run and you'll tell them
#
that you don't have to reach the finish line.
#
And I like that line because for me,
#
I think that too many of us in our lives
#
are too focused on a finish line.
#
Whereas sometimes it's just about the process.
#
Like I have a good friend, Subrath,
#
who runs I think more than 10K a day.
#
And he says that it's after the eighth kilometer
#
that I get that runner's high and I run for that.
#
And that is a whole thing.
#
And you know, that process is there.
#
As a metaphor, I just think that this is something
#
that certainly in my own life, I've tried to adopt that.
#
I mean, in a sense, there is no finish line.
#
You're not going to achieve anything great.
#
If you have grand goals,
#
you're not going to achieve any of your goals, right?
#
That's what I've kind of told myself.
#
But what is important is to love the process
#
and to enjoy the process.
#
At this moment, I'm enjoying the conversation.
#
I don't care when the episode is released,
#
what people say or what.
#
I don't even look at the numbers,
#
so that's why I don't even know.
#
But I don't care about that.
#
Do you think that, you know, through your life,
#
that that's also, you know,
#
how do you think about process and goals?
#
You know, how do you think about, you know,
#
the importance of doing something
#
for the sake of doing it?
#
And at the same time and in an opposite way,
#
the importance of having a clear understanding
#
that that is a goal this will take me towards.
#
How does one reconcile those?
#
Because at one level, when you're running,
#
the happiness of running,
#
perhaps a state of flow
#
that you might sometimes get into
#
the meditativeness of it,
#
it's great for its own sake.
#
if you're at kilometer 39
#
and your body wants to give up
#
and your brain is still forcing your mind,
#
your body to go forward inch by inch,
#
how do you think about processes and goals
#
but just life where we can ask ourselves,
#
like, why do I do what I do?
#
in every decision that we take in our life.
#
Even for a small thing like that,
#
suppose you want to outsource
#
some of the household work,
#
What is the pleasure that I get
#
or what is the nuisance
#
that I throw away by not doing this
#
or even any career related decisions
#
and all those things that you take.
#
I feel that goal setting is fine.
#
People, like, for instance,
#
because goals will guide you,
#
okay, you need to take these routes.
#
These are the different routes
#
that you take to have this goal.
#
So then you will know that
#
what are the different routes
#
that you want to take to that goal.
#
and we have to be very clear
#
what term that you want
#
Is it, are you still okay
#
with achieving it in five years
#
rather than next two years itself?
#
Like, do you want to set very hard goals?
#
Some of my people that I know
#
I have to do my 10,000 steps every day.
#
that way you're very hard on yourself.
#
And when it gets missed,
#
you get so irritated, right?
#
my day is spoiled today.
#
I couldn't even do my 10,000 steps.
#
I always try to finish it.
#
And then I remember like,
#
he has to do his walking every day, okay?
#
You won't believe even,
#
even at the day of my marriage,
#
it was already at six o'clock.
#
So he woke up at three o'clock
#
to go and finish his walking
#
and then come to my mom.
#
So there are people like that.
#
The problem with setting very hard goals
#
is that it's not just you,
#
you make people around you suffer as well.
#
So one has to be very mindful of that.
#
okay, goal setting is good,
#
but then we can't be so hard on ourselves
#
or the people around us.
#
So if I'm so hard that,
#
always have to go to at nine o'clock,
#
always have to sleep at nine o'clock.
#
I'll be either so hard on them
#
or hard on myself that,
#
okay, if something else happens,
#
then I'm really pissed off
#
and then I'm angry at my children,
#
you know, you don't want to avoid those things.
#
So I would say that goal setting
#
will help you to understand
#
what you want to do in life.
#
But then we should also be a little bit flexible
#
and make sure that it's not so hard
#
or so unachievable or so unthinkable
#
that it makes every life difficult.
#
Now, but regarding the processes,
#
it's very important, right?
#
As I said, there are different ways
#
you can achieve that goal.
#
You know, I would always choose the,
#
which process enriches me, right?
#
I want to publish in, let's say,
#
top five journals in economics.
#
I'm just giving you an example.
#
And then that's my goal.
#
Now, I can do it in two years,
#
I can do it in five years.
#
But then to publish in the top five journals,
#
I have to learn a number of things, right?
#
First of all, I need to learn to write
#
in a, how do you write in a top journal?
#
I need to pick up a research idea.
#
Then I have to understand
#
how do I execute this idea?
#
I have to make plans for this idea.
#
the problem is you can fail at that, right?
#
And you should allow for,
#
you should give that allowance for failures
#
because failures is where we learn a lot, right?
#
So I feel that the processes are so important
#
that you take the most enriching route to the goal
#
because you give yourself some time to enjoy as well, right?
#
and also you also give some breathing space
#
to the people around you.
#
Like you cannot be very hard,
#
especially if you're in a family
#
where you have kids and all those things.
#
You know, every day is so random,
#
things can go become very random.
#
Your plans can go off for the day and so on, right?
#
So you need to give those room to yourself
#
so that you enjoy that process and reach the goal.
#
And finally, at the end of it,
#
I have a little bit more learning than yesterday.
#
That's what I should feel.
#
That's how I should feel.
#
And that's how I take decisions in my life
#
I'm not able to write this article out, it's fine.
#
But I've said, have I learned something?
#
Okay, let me write it down.
#
but we should keep aiming
#
and then we should keep doing this.
#
But then the processes I feel are very,
#
I have always enjoyed the processes a lot.
#
Like I have enjoyed the teaching a lot.
#
How many students fail or how many finally take that?
#
Even if they come back after five years,
#
Five years later, they have come back and said that,
#
ma'am, your course was really helpful to me.
#
At that time, I definitely did not realize.
#
But you doing it in a certain way really helped me.
#
I know that I will not hear those words
#
when I finish my semester.
#
But I will might hear it.
#
If I've truly done my job well,
#
to the extent possible,
#
then I will know that I will have some rewards
#
at the end of the day, some time in life.
#
So I think that processes are really important.
#
Let's talk about your shifting to economics.
#
Like how did that happen?
#
And was it sparked by like a particular deep passion
#
in a subject that you were studying or a discipline
#
that, you know, did you fall in love with some aspect
#
of finance or economics?
#
And you said, oh, my God, I really have to go deeper
#
into this and you couldn't help yourself.
#
And then you decide that you're going to go further in that.
#
So take me through the processes of, you know,
#
getting more and more into economics.
#
And then how was it to actually make that decision
#
and decide that, okay, fine, I've done all of, you know,
#
bits and IIT and all that.
#
But, you know, I don't want to be an engineer.
#
I was interested in economics.
#
I got interested in economics.
#
And that's why I thought that I don't want
#
to be an engineer anymore.
#
Otherwise, I would have still been an engineer
#
and I would have continued with whatever job.
#
I started developing interest in economics.
#
See, it's a very, I tell my, even I tell everybody else,
#
like you can put economics into everyday life,
#
every decision, everything, every thought process,
#
you can bring an economic thinking to it, right?
#
And you also can understand why people behave
#
Because as you said, we talked about,
#
I think we have talked about opportunity costs,
#
We've talked about incentives and so on, right?
#
And that framework is very beautiful, right?
#
It tells you that, like I tell my students, like,
#
if you were not here, what would you have been doing?
#
That is your opportunity cost of spending
#
these two years in master's education.
#
So think about that and then accordingly decide, right?
#
So if you start thinking this opportunity cost framework
#
very early on in life, then you know that, okay,
#
I am, am I taking the, you know,
#
bad route to achieve something
#
or I'm taking the right route, right?
#
So that is a different, that's one way of thinking.
#
Similarly, we talked a lot about institutions,
#
how systems are very important, right?
#
And institutional economics is again,
#
a very important thing, right?
#
How institutions, strong institutions matter,
#
you know, be it firms management or be it a government
#
or whatever, be the institutions matter a lot, right?
#
And there are like formal institutions,
#
And how do you put those systems in place
#
so that it incentivizes people in the right way
#
so that you achieve the outcomes?
#
That framework again is so beautiful, right?
#
You should see, you can always rely on some benevolence
#
of people and all that, but ultimately,
#
you cannot say that for majority what works is
#
you should know that how to incentivize people
#
in the right way, recognize their work in the right way
#
and what motivates people to do this.
#
So unless you don't get that right,
#
it will fail most of the times.
#
So I was at this institute, one of these institutes
#
where the department was very good.
#
They had very good set of people,
#
colleagues were very helpful to each other and so on.
#
But then if you look at institutes policies, right?
#
Towards either whatever be it,
#
leave or promotions or whatever,
#
it was so, it didn't have the proper incentives
#
for people to do their best.
#
And people were doing their best
#
because they had a very good person
#
as the head of the institution.
#
Now, what people don't think is what happens
#
if that person leaves and somebody else gets replaced
#
and they start implementing rules
#
in the way it is written in the books, right?
#
I don't know why people don't think of that
#
in the longer term, right?
#
Longer term, what matters is,
#
okay, you know that these rules are there,
#
but then you have followed somewhere else
#
because you know that this is what is important for people
#
and this is what incentivizes people to deliver their best.
#
Why don't you just make it as a rule then, right?
#
Why don't you make flexible leave policy a rule,
#
flexible leave as rule?
#
Why don't you trust start trusting people
#
and giving them more responsibilities?
#
Why do you want to micromanage in the rule book?
#
It's all micromanagement.
#
But if you see in actual the way the institute is run,
#
it's no more micromanagement.
#
But how can it last forever if it's not in the system?
#
You know, it's so dependent then on persons.
#
So that is economic thinking, right?
#
This is how you think in economics, right?
#
Right from small, how prices work,
#
like my professor used to tell me,
#
like my guide, Professor Surya Nayana,
#
he used to tell me the best way to learn economics is go,
#
go to a person who sells vegetables on the streets,
#
ask what is the tomato price,
#
then go to the next supermarket that is there,
#
ask the kirana shop person what is the tomato price,
#
then go to a supermarket,
#
you know, hyper mart or somewhere and see the tomato price.
#
Now see, you see the price difference.
#
You see the price differences and then you start thinking,
#
why should the price of this person be higher?
#
Why is that person who's selling tomatoes on the street
#
at a higher price compared to the hyper mart, right?
#
Then you start understanding about, you know,
#
economic subscale, right?
#
So if every beautiful thing in life
#
can be put into this nice framework or thinking framework
#
that I felt that it's so nice,
#
it's such a beautiful way to relate
#
and I see it in everyday life decisions as well.
#
I tell people it's not something that you learn in class
#
and then you forget about it.
#
You can actually apply it to your,
#
this is something you can actually apply
#
to your day-to-day lives, right?
#
How do you organize things?
#
So you start thinking about, do you really,
#
if this is taking more time, then do you want to do this?
#
Do you want to outsource this?
#
What is the opportunity cost of doing this and so on, right?
#
Even for a very small work
#
that takes half an hour of your time every day,
#
what do you want to do?
#
Do you want to do it or you don't want to do it, right?
#
And how do you think about it?
#
Think of the opportunity cost, right?
#
So this is how I learned economics
#
and I start learning about terms and so on.
#
Not exactly newspapers.
#
Newspapers give a very different idea to it.
#
Then I go and explore the terms.
#
I pick up books and I search in the internet.
#
I started searching, what are these terms?
#
And then going through these examples
#
and then I start understanding
#
and then I start that, okay, there's this very beautiful,
#
this is the best beautiful thing
#
that and also the realization that any resources,
#
the resources are always scanned
#
and then you say that you maximize the usage
#
and so is that you achieve the optimal results, right?
#
That's the best thing in life, I feel.
#
That's the best part of economics, I feel.
#
No, I totally share your love for the subject in the sense
#
for me economics is a study of human behavior, period.
#
It is not the economy or GDP numbers
#
or fiscal deficit, all that nonsense.
#
It is how you and I sit with each other and talk.
#
It is what, you know, it will dictate all my actions
#
I used to do this section in Pragati,
#
the magazine I used to edit for Takshashila
#
and the section was called Houseful Economics.
#
So I would use Bollywood to illustrate concepts.
#
So for opportunity cost, I used the song from Golmaal.
#
Because that is everything right there
#
and once you get that, you get opportunity cost, you know,
#
and exactly the same thing you ask your students.
#
If you weren't at class, where would you be?
#
And, you know, and then it is so intuitive
#
and once you have the frame,
#
so many things kind of become so much clearer.
#
Here's the thing, you fall in love with economics
#
the same way I did because, hey,
#
it explains everything about the world and that's great.
#
Then you take it up as a field,
#
as a discipline that you're actually studying,
#
you do your PhD and all of that
#
and then you actually have to decide that, okay,
#
within this discipline, what domains do I go for?
#
What do I actually study?
#
You know, that nitty-gritty begins.
#
So how was that process like?
#
Like, you know, what was your PhD on?
#
What were the fields and domains that attracted you?
#
And how did you decide upon the direction
#
which you eventually took?
#
So for me, it was natural that I picked up development economics.
#
A lot of things like credit, land markets, credit markets,
#
you know, poverty, all these things are really like,
#
and now I started, whatever I've experienced in my real life
#
is something that is out there as a theory
#
and there's a theoretical model that explains why there is,
#
why some nations escape poverty, why some don't,
#
why some people fall into poverty traps,
#
when do people fall into poverty traps,
#
what is the cognitive ability to do with poverty traps?
#
All these were things where, you know, very enlightening to me.
#
Like, okay, I knew about these things in a very layman way
#
and then now you give me this model
#
or economic thinking, theoretical model to it
#
and then I start understanding things better, right?
#
And then I also now learn to understand, okay,
#
but then this is a simplified model.
#
What if you add now more constraints to it?
#
Like, for instance, what if you add identity to it?
#
That's what we did in one of our papers
#
when we talk about intimate partner violence.
#
We put a simple, we start with a simple household bargaining model
#
Where you say that, okay, if the woman,
#
the household bargaining model is very simple,
#
it says that if the woman has a higher bargaining power,
#
like, for instance, if she has an income,
#
unearned or earned income,
#
she would have a higher bargaining power
#
and therefore she would face the likelihood
#
of facing domestic violence will be lower
#
because she has some bargaining power at home.
#
Now, add a more constraint to it,
#
but however, the gender,
#
you can add the gender identity framework to this
#
and this is not my framework.
#
It's a theoretical framework that I borrow from economics.
#
So, this is Akerlof's framework where they say that,
#
but there is an identity,
#
there is a utility people gain
#
from attaching to a particular identity.
#
For instance, I gain a utility
#
by behaving in a certain way
#
as a woman is expected to behave in the society.
#
So, for instance, if women are expected
#
not to go out and work, right?
#
And I gain a utility by following those rules of the society
#
and if I deviate from that rules of the society,
#
Then what happens is when you add
#
this kind of a constraint to this,
#
that people have an identity also,
#
people derive by attaching to a particular identity.
#
You can think of identity as religion, caste, gender,
#
any identity that you want to bring.
#
And if you say that, okay,
#
but I deviated from my identity
#
and then I started working,
#
I started doing paid work.
#
Now, I get some disutility because I have deviated.
#
So, what we tell in our paper with Vidya is that
#
that, see, so the disutility gain means
#
that women start feeling guilty
#
because they know that they have gone
#
what is away from their prescribed role in the society.
#
So, the disutility means that they start feeling guilty
#
and then this is what is also called
#
the working mom's guilt in the literature.
#
And so, then I accept violence more than the other.
#
So, in the paper, we actually find that
#
women who work in India, in urban India,
#
accept violence more than the women who do not work.
#
They justify domestic violence
#
more than the women who do not work.
#
Now, this is what is a beautiful thinking
#
that you can add with the framework.
#
So, this is how the development economic subject
#
is what I got interested into.
#
So, I started looking into health
#
and health-related poverty in my PhD thesis.
#
That gave me a lot of insights on,
#
like, for instance, in that I also looked at
#
state health insurance policy.
#
At that time, specifically, I looked at
#
health insurance policy of Andhra Pradesh.
#
It was the Rajiv Aarogya Surya scheme that came.
#
One of the first states to implement
#
a universal health insurance scheme
#
even before the Ayushman Bharat
#
and all that came in the recent years.
#
So, and we evaluate the scheme.
#
How does it help people, poor people
#
from falling back into poverty?
#
So, I look at health shocks
#
and their coping strategies of people
#
and how they get affected by that
#
in the short term and the long term.
#
How it affects their investment
#
in children's education and so on.
#
So, these are some things I've seen in my life
#
and then all I have to do is put in economic thinking,
#
do some analysis with the data
#
and get those results out.
#
And further beyond, I went,
#
so I've broadly worked in health, education,
#
And in particular focusing on gender,
#
that's how I started developing my interest.
#
So, one of the things I would say is,
#
like, I found my macro classes to be the most interesting,
#
but I knew that that is something like GDP and,
#
you know, growth and it's fine,
#
but I could not, you know, make that connection to it.
#
But development economics is the connection
#
that I immediately made.
#
And I've stayed in that development economics
#
since the time of my PhD.
#
Is there something the orthodoxy gets wrong?
#
Orthodoxy gets wrong, many of the things.
#
See, I am thinking that, see, this frame,
#
one thing I've learned is that these frameworks
#
The small simplified economic models
#
are thinking are very beautiful.
#
They help to simplify too many things
#
that happen at the same time
#
and just focus on one of the things
#
that you want to narrate in your essay.
#
But that is also the drawback as well, right?
#
Because we have simplified it too much
#
that it cannot actually capture
#
all the complexities of the society.
#
But then if it is able to explain
#
the dominant factors at play,
#
that is good enough for us
#
because that's what you want to go after, right?
#
What dominant factors are there
#
which changes your outcomes?
#
And what kind of policy changes
#
that kind of change in outcomes, right?
#
If you are able to capture this.
#
Now, the problem is that
#
where economists have these debates
#
is down around which factors are important
#
and how do they influence,
#
what are the pathways through
#
which they influence the outcomes,
#
whatever outcomes they are thinking of.
#
And how do you achieve that, right?
#
That's where the big debates are.
#
And I feel that we get lost
#
in these debates around this.
#
So, I feel that models are good.
#
They help us to simplify
#
the problem first and third.
#
But we should start soon understanding
#
to what level does it help us to understand
#
and what are the things it does not capture.
#
And those things that are not captured
#
in the model, are they important
#
or they are not very relevant to us
#
And we have to keep questioning this
#
and that can keep changing over time as well.
#
Like the way I explained in the app thing,
#
the earned wage access thing.
#
So, tell me about, you know,
#
how your trajectory proceeds from here.
#
Like you do your PhD at IGIDR.
#
Where do you go from there?
#
And what are the interesting kind of...
#
Like you've already described
#
a couple of the interesting studies, right?
#
You've done that domestic violence one
#
is really fascinating because
#
that insight is so counterintuitive, you know?
#
And so, what are the interesting sort of
#
the work that you get drawn to
#
and to what extent is, you know,
#
the institution you're part of,
#
to what extent does it...
#
Are they a constraint in that
#
or a guiding factor in that?
#
Tell me about how all of that evolves,
#
your work evolves from there.
#
I focused more on teaching for the initial years
#
because that was the first time I was teaching.
#
And it really took a long time to get that.
#
You need to really, you know,
#
spend long hours in the initial days of teaching
#
before you know that you can be a good teacher.
#
And also because I had my own constraints,
#
like for instance, I had my son and so on.
#
But once I stabilized in teaching
#
and my family life also got stabilized,
#
so that is when I started thinking
#
about exploring new interests.
#
And that's when, in fact,
#
that's when I started working with Vidya
#
and we started thinking about employment
#
and her work at Grizzle.
#
And as well as my interest with respect to,
#
you know, looking at gender and labor,
#
we mashed in a lot of things
#
and we worked together for a lot more projects thereafter.
#
one is looking at women's labor force participation
#
when they are in nuclear versus joint family households.
#
You know, in countries like Southeast Asia,
#
especially in China, Japan and all those countries,
#
the literature shows that women who are closer to their,
#
either their parents or in-laws,
#
are able to spend more time in labor market
#
than women who do not have access to this kind of support system
#
because they help to take care of children
#
or they help in their domestic work and so on.
#
But you find opposite is the case in India.
#
the women who live in joint families
#
actually have lower autonomy
#
compared to the women who live in nuclear households
#
If you look at any INFHS data
#
or India Human Development Surveys or any data,
#
you see that their access to resources,
#
all are very constrained.
#
So women in India in joint family structures
#
are actually working less
#
compared to women in nuclear family households.
#
And of course, after that,
#
there have been many studies
#
which have looked at presence of father-in-law
#
versus mother-in-law and so on
#
and different things later on.
#
And then we also looked on the side.
#
When I was doing this work,
#
we were doing some interviews
#
in the outskirts of villages of Chennai.
#
we were talking to this group of women
#
and we were asking about
#
their experience of violence, domestic violence.
#
There were this group of women
#
have you ever experienced violence
#
like beaten up by your husbands and so on.
#
They were laughing at it and like,
#
yeah, yeah, yeah, be of all experience.
#
she gets bashed up the most among all of us.
#
And they were laughing at all.
#
I'm like, it was very shocking for me
#
to even talk about violence
#
and then laugh it off as a joke.
#
how can you take it so lightly?
#
I asked them this question
#
and then they say that,
#
ma'am, what can be done?
#
Our husbands have worked only 10 days in a month.
#
they are just here without any work in the village
#
and they see us earning
#
and then they think that
#
we are taking control of the household.
#
That's when they get beaten up.
#
It's okay for a man to feel that way, right?
#
Because they are not able to provide for the family
#
and that's why they show it on us.
#
That's when we realized that,
#
okay, this acceptance is there.
#
And then when we looked at the data,
#
Vidya and myself found that,
#
actually in the data also shows
#
that violence justification is higher.
#
This is where we started then looking at
#
other constraints that women face,
#
like mobility, for instance,
#
is one of the things that we look at.
#
One of our works where we see is that
#
even if they're working in the same place,
#
travel to work in different ways.
#
Especially in places like Chennai,
#
the private vehicle ownership
#
that their reliance on public transport
#
or even just walking to work
#
is so less compared to women, right?
#
It's the same case in Bangalore as well,
#
but in Mumbai, it's not the case.
#
We found that public transport
#
is actually an equalizer in Mumbai
#
for men and women working
#
in the same kind of office environment.
#
Both were equally likely
#
to take the public transport in Mumbai alone
#
compared to the cities like Bangalore and Chennai.
#
So these are some of the important insights,
#
then how mobility becomes a constraint.
#
For instance, a woman said that
#
they just had to leave the job
#
because they couldn't travel anymore.
#
There were women, for instance,
#
who said that they could,
#
the retail jobs that they were doing
#
means that they had to,
#
their work shifts ends at nine o'clock
#
or that's when the shops close, right?
#
Then they had to walk to the MRTS station in Chennai.
#
From there, they have to take a train.
#
They said that this place,
#
walking from the shop to the station,
#
it's just a half a kilometer walk,
#
but the roads were so dark
#
and it was so isolated at that time
#
that unless they walked in groups,
#
they will never want to work there.
#
And they said that when there were rainy days,
#
they will make sure that they don't go to work that day
#
because again, they can't take that road.
#
And then the kind of harassment
#
that they have faced in the trains and public places,
#
So these are some of the constraints,
#
the mobility barriers that we try to bring up in our case.
#
Now, in my work continuing with Good Business Lab,
#
the best part of my work right now is
#
I also get to talk to employers,
#
not just women who are working.
#
Earlier, it always used to be one side of the story,
#
the women who are working,
#
who are trying to work or find job opportunities and so on.
#
But right now, I'm actually getting to talk to people
#
from the employer's point of view as well.
#
What are their constraints in employing women?
#
How do they look at women working in their factories?
#
So we say that the job opportunities are scarce and so on,
#
but you can't believe that in the garment industry,
#
the monthly turnover of workers is 8% to 10%,
#
which means that 70% to 80% of the workers get replaced every year.
#
So imagine that you're every day recruiting a new workforce altogether.
#
The moment you see those numbers,
#
it's just mind blowing.
#
On one side, you have this jobless situation.
#
You say that people don't have enough jobs.
#
On the other side, you have these firms complaining
#
that they don't have labor shortages.
#
Even yesterday, a former worker was saying that
#
we really wish that we could do something about the labor attrition problems
#
because right now we have so many export orders,
#
but we are not able to take it up because we don't have enough labor.
#
This is a story that we hear from the firm.
#
So where is this mismatch happening and what are the issues that are happening?
#
It's very important to understand.
#
And the situation is so different from if you look at rural factories
#
versus urban factories in Bangalore and so on.
#
The kind of problems that they have and the issues,
#
what leads to attrition is also different among these factories.
#
All these things I'm able to understand
#
because I'm working with this research organization,
#
which is Good Business Lab, which is collaborating with industries.
#
I really wish that Academia also has more and more collaboration with industries
#
and they look at problems mutually of mutual interest as well.
#
It's very difficult to sit in Academia and make these kind of contacts.
#
And this is where I feel that again, our research should go,
#
we should do more different kind of research and just say,
#
okay, you're published in these journals and therefore you become a professor and so on.
#
Because ultimately, I feel like now I'm looking at problems
#
really from both the employer and the worker side.
#
I'm able to relate to them.
#
So then our questions are then what can you do to motivate workers,
#
especially women, to stay longer in the workforce?
#
What are the things that make them leave the workforce?
#
What kind of investments that the firm can make so that they are also sustainable?
#
You cannot say, ask the firm, you should be a benevolent
#
and then you should do great things for your workers or so on.
#
That is not a sustainable thing.
#
What makes it sustainable?
#
These are the things that I kind of study right now.
#
I remember my father, when I moved to this research organization,
#
my father asked me, so he is a trade union person.
#
You know how they think, right?
#
So now you're trying to replace the labor unions?
#
That's what I was going to ask.
#
So I said, no, why do you think that only labor unions can look at workers' issues?
#
Why do you always have to be skeptical of outside people?
#
You should be more welcoming and you should be more willing to work with people
#
and experiment different things.
#
It is not always you versus the firm's management.
#
It's not always you're on the other side or this side.
#
You can never be somewhere in between.
#
But he keeps asking me, so who is supporting your work?
#
Who is paying for your research?
#
Are you representing the firm?
#
Are you representing the worker?
#
I'm like, the world is not binary.
#
There are different other things as well.
#
And then I have to explain to them how we write for research grants.
#
There are organizations that give grants and then we get the grants.
#
And through that, we fund the research.
#
But some of the firms in the industry have decided to give us the space
#
to conduct our research.
#
And this is also another thing.
#
Very few firms in India have this open mindset to collaborate
#
and be open to other people who want to come up with new ideas
#
or who want to conduct research as well.
#
So one of the very famous online delivery platforms in India,
#
so we were talking to that firm's management and they were saying that,
#
no, we don't want you to look at our data.
#
We have all technical people looking at all that.
#
You just conduct a survey among our partners and tell us how they file.
#
That's what they understand as a result.
#
They should be a little bit more open and be willing to more share
#
and also experiment, right?
#
Both from the firm as well as academicians.
#
I feel that that would go a long way in understanding
#
and getting even more fruitful research
#
and research that can be implemented, that can be tested
#
and also scaled up as policies later, right?
#
That can be done only if we really collaborate at the ground level
#
with real life situations and problems.
#
I don't discard every academic research as rubbish,
#
but then I also think that there should be a balance,
#
that research for the sake of research and research that solves problems of society.
#
There should be a balance between the two.
#
Admitted, most academic research is rubbish.
#
There's no relevance to the real world.
#
Which is why I respect the work Vidya and you do so much
#
that you're out there in the real world looking at real world problems.
#
Here's my next question.
#
Give me a sense of like in both phases of your learning.
#
One is the studies that you've done with Vidya and by yourself
#
and with others where you're looking at the workers themselves
#
and digging deep into that.
#
And the second phase where you're looking at the problem
#
from the other side of industries.
#
In both these phases, what are the really unusual insights that you've had
#
which have really blown your mind?
#
Like you've already shared two or three of them
#
during the course of this conversation.
#
But what are the kind of insights which would surprise everybody,
#
which perhaps go against conventional thinking in the field?
#
Tell me a little bit about that,
#
like which studies are really dear to you in terms of what they revealed?
#
Right now I'm working in the good business lab.
#
I work with the founders Achyut Dwaru and then Ananth Nishidam
#
with a lot of research projects with them.
#
And also I work with Vidya where we look at the...
#
We got this World Bank funding and where we look at data from again,
#
from textiles industry, firm level data.
#
And we look at the attrition and absenteeism problems from there.
#
In both these phases, one needs to understand how the industry operates itself.
#
For instance, look at the garment industry.
#
You have these orders, you compete for these orders.
#
Moment you get these orders, you need to finish this production on time.
#
If you want to be getting these brands orders and so on.
#
And this is like you're competing in the global supply chain.
#
And there is so much pressure that the styles change, the design changes.
#
When you go to the factory on days when there is a change from one design to another design,
#
oh my God, the pressure is so high.
#
Because that's the first time you start stitching that by a type of jeans or a shirt or whatever.
#
And then the first day is always very terrible.
#
You need to get those stitches.
#
There will be a lot more flaws in the first day.
#
And therefore there will be a lot of this pressure in the factory environment
#
till they get stabilized and to the design style.
#
And then they start producing in mass.
#
One of the things that I understood is the global supply chain.
#
How our industries are just a part of the supply chain.
#
So for instance, where do we source our fabric from?
#
Where do we dye our fabrics?
#
If you go to Tirupur, it's very famous for its exporting knitwear.
#
But then if you see that even lots of big exporting firms,
#
they outsource their dirtiest operations, which is dyeing to smaller micro units.
#
Because dyeing is a very dirty operation.
#
In terms of effluent treatment plant, in terms of energy,
#
that is the amount of wood or coal you have to burn to dye a fabric.
#
All these things mean that they will float a lot of environmental laws.
#
The bigger firms are much more under scrutiny than the smaller firms.
#
So then these operations are outsourced.
#
That's how you create a microcosm of industry supporting this.
#
These are some revelations.
#
You understand then how the industry itself operates under a set of labor laws,
#
under a set of environmental laws and so on.
#
For instance, I went to this micro small MSME during our MSME visits to Tirupur.
#
One of the owners told us that I asked him, how many workers do you have?
#
So very casually, he told me in Tamil,
#
ma'am, you ask all these questions and then you will go and report to some labor officer
#
and tell that this person is employing 20 people and only 10 people are on the register.
#
I don't want all these things to come up.
#
That's why we don't entertain outside people.
#
That's why we are very skeptical of outside people.
#
Because I was speaking his language, he was at least open about this thing.
#
But then you start understanding all these informal things that go on.
#
I went to one of the dying units and then this person was saying,
#
the supervisor of that unit was saying, actually ma'am,
#
the government has stopped giving licenses to dying units.
#
All the dying units that are currently in place are the old licenses.
#
They were given much long back.
#
Now, if you want to get a license for running a dying unit,
#
you need to upfront give so many crores as a cost because for the pollution control
#
and all those things, you need to pay those costs and nobody wants to give it.
#
Even if you're willing to pay it also, the government doesn't want
#
because it knows that it's a polluting industry, the people are up in arms.
#
This is a balance that the firms are operating in.
#
On one side, the old licenses held by old people are there.
#
Now, what happens is that they don't operate the factory.
#
There's all the machines are there.
#
The boilers, the centers, the dying missions are all there.
#
But then they are not operating.
#
But imagine the license costs so much.
#
So they lease it out to somebody else.
#
Somebody comes and runs it, takes an export order.
#
Six months, they have to die this much of fabric and give it.
#
They run it and they just go away.
#
See, the way the firms have started doing things informally
#
to operate in a set of constrained environment,
#
you need to understand this thing in a wholesome way to say that,
#
okay, because otherwise you will come out of utopian policies.
#
Firms should, you know, where we a lot of academic research,
#
they write that women should be given a van transportation.
#
They should be picked up from home and dropped at home.
#
They should not give a night shift.
#
Whatever policies that you come up with,
#
you should understand how much is this happening in real life.
#
What is the cost that the firms pay, right?
#
What are the constraints they operate in?
#
And then similarly workers.
#
What are the constraints they operate in?
#
You should understand what are the norms that they face,
#
especially women or men, when they come to work.
#
What happens in a workplace?
#
What does a workplace environment look like?
#
See, unless you have this exposure and experience of these real world things,
#
understand how a factory works.
#
Now I find that all research where you have not even visited a factory,
#
but then you write about laws on factory,
#
number of factories open and it becomes little difficult to digest these numbers.
#
I mean, you should know, you should be able to connect to it in the real life.
#
That's where I feel that my job right now is very enriching with Good Business Lab
#
because it gives me that opportunity to talk to these management.
#
They have created this atmosphere where they have started to convince industries
#
that you can be open to research.
#
You need not always look at that, okay, these people will go report something.
#
Officers will come up and then they'll show up.
#
They will go and report environmental flouting or labor flouting and all.
#
There can be mutual trust and then industries can start working together
#
and that needs a lot and lot of persuasion.
#
It takes time to build that relationship with industry,
#
build that trust with industry and then where industries start working.
#
I feel that that's very important.
#
Always having an outsider perspective to anything that we do in life helps.
#
They can always tell you, hey, why don't you look at it in this way
#
or why don't you do things in different way?
#
Of course, firms on one side say, you are not the person who's running the business.
#
I'm the person who's running the business.
#
Why should you know more than me?
#
Even that's one of the attitudes that I hear from the firm.
#
But it's not always like that.
#
It's just that I bring a different perspective of looking at the same problem.
#
It might be useful to you or might not be useful to you,
#
but let's try and test it out, right?
#
You should be at least open to do that.
#
And how do you convince firms?
#
Even for that, you need a kind of organizational ability
#
to go and talk to these firms and build this kind of relationship.
#
All this has to be done in a very systematic manner, right?
#
And it takes a lot of efforts, a lot of people, a lot of skills, people skills
#
So we have our research team, but we also have other teams,
#
partnership team who is able to build partners
#
or able to explore new opportunities, right?
#
Like that, you have different teams who build this kind of relationships.
#
And then we start doing the research with different organizations.
#
Since you shifted to sort of looking at this part of the puzzle,
#
the firms themselves, what have you changed your mind about?
#
Or is there an issue on which you've gained a lot of nuance
#
which changes the way you look at it?
#
Yes, I think I've gained a lot of nuance, right?
#
For instance, see, when you just look at a woman going to work
#
and have this thing, you'll come up with policies
#
which look at a very one-sided approach.
#
And you might look at, you might give policy suggestions
#
that may not be sustainable in the long term, right?
#
Or who pays the cost for this?
#
That's always the question, right?
#
You can say that, okay, to solve the mobility problems,
#
all women should be picked up and dropped at home.
#
Now, that's also a solution that you can come up with.
#
But who pays the cost for this?
#
And then how much does it eat up into either the wages of the worker
#
or in the profits of this thing?
#
Then is it sustainable and does it increase the cost of business,
#
Or is it for a worker, the wages become too less
#
that I don't think I have to work only for getting this much amount of money?
#
So, this is very important, right?
#
This nuances start questioning.
#
You start questioning these things.
#
And then you now then think of policies that where you also think,
#
okay, who are all the first systemic thinking is
#
who are all the players in this,
#
who are all the stakeholders in this process, right?
#
And then if something is changed, who are the benefactors?
#
And somebody is always bearing cost for something, right?
#
You cannot have, there's no freedom as we say in economics.
#
That means that somebody is benefiting and somebody is paying up the cost.
#
Then can you now turn the table and say that,
#
okay, can this be made in a sustainable?
#
What things can be made sustainable?
#
What are things that whatever you try to do, it is not sustainable.
#
Only government can intervene and has to bear that subsidy.
#
For instance, I'll give you an example.
#
We went to this very famous manufacturing,
#
vehicle manufacturing company in Chennai.
#
And then we talked to the vice president and she was telling us that,
#
no, government has brought this law of maternity benefit tax, right?
#
And then they say that you have to run a crochet
#
if there are more than 50 people in your organization.
#
Now, she's saying, look at our crochet.
#
It's so beautiful, right?
#
There is one woman who comes and drops her child.
#
Imagine the cost to the company to run that crochet.
#
You have first of all allocated an office space
#
that is the primary of Chennai, right?
#
Corporate office space, a part of it is allocated
#
and you know that the cost of it, the rental cost of it is so high.
#
On top of it, you employ people to run that crochet.
#
And then there is one woman who comes.
#
Now, this is the kind of policy thinking I'm saying that
#
who should bear the cost?
#
And then when we ask why this is the case,
#
why are not women are not using this?
#
She told that, but women are coming,
#
traveling from some neighborhood to another neighborhood
#
and comes to workplace.
#
Now, where do I want the crochet?
#
Should I want the crochet near my home or near the office or in my office, right?
#
Like for instance, what happens to children going to school?
#
Who will pick them from school and drop them in the crochet?
#
Who will then take them?
#
There's so many things that they have to work out even in this kind of situation.
#
So, you know, government has only imposed more costs
#
by saying that you have to run a crochet, right?
#
On organizations like this.
#
Like for instance, I asked my husband once that
#
why can't you take our youngest son and drop him in crochet
#
your workplace should have, right?
#
He's like, you know what?
#
Only women can drop their kids.
#
I'm like, what is this?
#
This is very crazy rule, right?
#
I mean, neither my husband can benefit out of this rule,
#
nor I can benefit because
#
my organization does not have 50 people
#
so that they don't have to provide crochet.
#
Now his organization provides, but he cannot drop.
#
Only women can drop their kids.
#
Okay, what societal problem have we solved by this?
#
Whose labor force participation are you increasing?
#
You know, this is how, you know,
#
it is important to understand
#
what are the implications of this policy?
#
See, you cannot complain that
#
you bring these kind of rules and later complain that
#
obviously organizations don't want to take women
#
if you bring these kinds of costs on organization.
#
Already, we do not have enough job situations.
#
On top of it, you're adding more and more costs
#
to the organization to hire women
#
by saying you have to pay maternity benefits.
#
See, you take other governments
#
where it's not the companies that pay.
#
If the government pays,
#
then the companies have no incentive
#
to discriminate against you.
#
then a lot of people I know have said that
#
they ask, are you married?
#
If you're married, have you already had your kids or not?
#
If you have not had your kids, they will not hire you
#
because they know that you will be pregnant sometime soon
#
and then I will have to pay your maternity benefits
#
or I don't want you have kids and come,
#
I will be able to hire.
#
People have outrightly said this on the faces.
#
How many people will go to the labor court
#
I know of organizations
#
who have denied maternity benefits,
#
state-run organizations
#
who have denied maternity benefits to women.
#
It's just not sustainable for them to do.
#
So we think that just by bringing a rule,
#
we solve the problems of women's labor force participation.
#
But the idea is that the government
#
has moved the burden from itself to somebody else.
#
It's just shifting the burden from one thing to another
#
and not solving the problem.
#
I think in every domain,
#
I find that lazy virtue signaling elites
#
will push for policies that are great on intention
#
and have terrible outcomes
#
and they simply won't care about the outcome.
#
When I was editing Pragati,
#
I remember I had run pieces by Suman Joshi
#
and another one by Devika Kher
#
where we spoke about the Maternity Benefits Act
#
and how terrible it was
#
and how it hurt women far more than it helped them.
#
One of those pieces, in fact,
#
was written before it came into effect
#
predicting that it would hurt women.
#
And if you have basic economic thinking,
#
it's kind of easy to figure that out.
#
But too many elites and lazy thinkers
#
will just go for the intention
#
and not understand the nuances.
#
And I often feel that, look,
#
we should have maternity benefits.
#
We should have awesome working conditions for mothers.
#
You want that equitable environment.
#
But I believe that state mandating it won't make it happen.
#
It has to come from competition
#
where companies are competing for labor
#
and therefore they are bringing these better policies into play.
#
And my next question here is that
#
in the work that you've done
#
you've worked with firms to understand their points of view
#
but you've also been able to, I presume,
#
bring the points of view of the laborers themselves.
#
So what kind of changes
#
have you seen firms actually going through?
#
Have you been able to influence their decisions?
#
And you don't have to take particular names
#
but just to get a sense of what kind of change is possible
#
from what kind of insights?
#
So, I mean, our work that we have done currently
#
is to look at different aspects of how to enable
#
or women to go from this just earning to empowerment.
#
So, for instance, some of the projects that I work with
#
is about financial inclusion for women
#
who are working in these factories.
#
So, I discussed with you the earned wage access, right?
#
It's one of the ways that that's all some kind of liquidity issues
#
because women might not have access to formal sources
#
like, for instance, an overdraft facility.
#
So, you think of these solutions to help them
#
so that they don't fall into these debt traps
#
and it also takes that financial stress away from the women
#
so that they are able to come to the workplace
#
and without that stress and work, right?
#
But also all these different solutions
#
address different aspects of life.
#
That is something we should always be cognizant of
#
and we should also think about
#
if we combine these things, what happens, right?
#
These are some of the things
#
that we have to think in the longer term.
#
One of the other things we worked at
#
is developing this financial tool for workers.
#
It's called the diaries, financial diaries, worker diaries.
#
So, where we look again in the business lab,
#
we have implemented it in four factories in Bangalore and Mysore
#
where we help women to track their inflows and outflows, right?
#
Cash inflows and outflows.
#
As I told you before that women
#
who were initially even very hesitant to come near the tablet
#
and make the entries are now so confident
#
in just one and a half months of time with that all that training
#
and there's no so confident they understand.
#
Ma'am, now we are able to understand
#
how these things, where my money comes and where it goes.
#
I really didn't know that even keeping track of the small things
#
will help me to budget better, learn to make budget.
#
See, financial literacy is something like very lagging.
#
Forget the low income workers even among very educated people
#
that literacy in terms of how do you understand interest rates,
#
how do you understand returns, how do you understand inflation,
#
how do you know how to save for longer term, short term goals
#
and what are the different financial tools
#
or what are the different financial markets available.
#
Is it credit that you have taken very costly to you?
#
Does it solve problems or does it actually increase your problem?
#
These kinds of mental calculations can be so taxing,
#
especially for low income workers who most of their thing
#
goes on just looking at their very basic needs, right?
#
So in those cases, we have really been able to understand
#
and help workers to make those kind of understand,
#
get better financial literacy, also understand where their money is flowing
#
and then they are able to save better.
#
So that is one of the...
#
Another project that we have done is the worker voice tool.
#
So we have built this anonymized tool.
#
You can just call and talk in any language that you want
#
and then your message gets anonymized.
#
It goes as a message to some third person where from there
#
it goes into the department where the complaint is raised about.
#
So for instance, if you complain about the food,
#
it goes to a particular committee.
#
If you complain about sanitation or if you complain about your supervisor,
#
it goes to a different department.
#
So again, this is another tool that we have.
#
So these are all these different solutions that we try and work with factories.
#
So see earlier what factories had, they had a complaint box.
#
And everybody knows that if you go near the complaint box,
#
the whole factory can see you.
#
Nobody would want to go to the complaint box and put a complaint there, right?
#
But with this anonymous tool, you can complain about sexual harassment.
#
Let's say your supervisor is yelling at you or you not being able to
#
express things in your complaint box because you need to write there.
#
Here you can just call a number from any phone
#
and then record a message and then just send it.
#
And these kind of things, the small improvements that you make in the factory
#
might help workers make their environment better.
#
And one of the things that we are trying to also tell firms is that
#
it's not just their benefit, but these changes also help you in your ESG goals.
#
Again, firms who are exporting are very cognizant of these things, right?
#
Environment sustainability or diversity and all those goals that they have.
#
We tell them that how it enables them as well to achieve their goals.
#
And also it can be sustainable, right?
#
Like they actually start reaping the returns out of it.
#
For instance, if you can show them that the absenteeism reduces,
#
by implementing a certain change, then the cost to the firms go down
#
and then therefore the profitability goes up.
#
Or if you show that the attrition reduces,
#
that the cost of replacement of workers is so high
#
that if you are able to reduce that, again, you know that.
#
So these are different ways that we do interventions at the Good Business Lab.
#
And we have approached it from different angles.
#
So financial inclusion is one.
#
The other one is we look at health of workers.
#
Then we look at the work environment itself.
#
What is the environment of work, work policies and so on.
#
And this is where I felt that I have learned a lot.
#
And see, one thing is to tell, do research and say that
#
I found 10% returns or something.
#
But another thing is the art of convincing the firms.
#
That is very also important.
#
You cannot just publish in academic journal
#
and we say that I am done, my life's goal is achieved.
#
So my research is out in A-star journal and I am done.
#
But there is a next level to it.
#
You can, from your research, how do you go further
#
and make it a workable solution, a scalable solution
#
that the firms can themselves implement and scale up
#
without your help, without your support.
#
That is the last mile, right, that you want to go further.
#
And if it works for more firms, then you can convince
#
that it can work for the industry.
#
Then you can make it as a policy level at the macro level.
#
I mean, I'm saying, but at least let's have those goals.
#
And then that is the thing that I learned
#
that it's one thing to do research.
#
But another thing is to make it work in real life.
#
To actually make it benefit those people
#
whom you are targeting in real life.
#
You're absolutely the best kind of economist.
#
Listeners should really be inspired by this.
#
No, I'm serious about that.
#
And I have a plan for you, which is that you do so much
#
good work in this field that you're doing
#
that one day you put your dad's trade union out of business
#
and then you go and tell him,
#
I put your trade union out of,
#
I put your labor union out of business.
#
You know, when I tell my dad that, you know,
#
see the trade union is fascinating thing.
#
I tell my dad that we all should coexist, right?
#
See, the problem, one thing I realized
#
in my very young age from the trade union
#
is that how trade unions want to
#
call everybody a worker, a worker.
#
There is no, you don't want like,
#
that's true with any movements I feel like,
#
take Dravidian movement.
#
It said that everybody is against this Brahminic culture,
#
this dominance of Brahmins in the society.
#
We are against that, right?
#
But then there is heterogeneity within that.
#
They were, you had these dominant castes
#
and then you had the schedule castes.
#
And I would say that, but by the Dravidian movement,
#
OBC has gained a lot compared to the schedule castes
#
because they were said, now you,
#
they said, it is all your identities.
#
You are now Dravidians and we are all up against the,
#
you know, dominance of Brahmins,
#
superiority of Brahmins in the society.
#
Take feminist movements.
#
It might say that we are all women.
#
We should not see, there are no black women.
#
There are no white women.
#
So we stop looking at the heterogeneity.
#
Similar is what with ICI felt with trade unions
#
that within workers, you had women,
#
their needs or their, the way you address their needs,
#
their issues is different from how you address male workers.
#
And same way, like there will be workers,
#
like say even within workers, it might be the case that
#
it is always the disadvantaged cast groups
#
that will get the least, the jobs that you really,
#
like cleaners or so on, right?
#
They will never go on to become operators,
#
but that is not what they care.
#
What they care is we will all should be represented
#
as workers against a firm management.
#
So I said that, you know, I tell my father
#
that world is much more complex than that.
#
By looking, by gathering workers as workers,
#
you have tried to achieve a few things,
#
but by also going deeper into it
#
and looking at especially into women
#
or especially into certain type of workers,
#
we are also trying to contribute to it.
#
What is wrong with that, right?
#
And we should not mask these heterogeneities.
#
I mean, in some sense, it achieves certain things,
#
but you should also know that there are certain things
#
that you don't achieve and others maybe can achieve.
#
And you should be happy that others are able
#
to do something for workers, right?
#
Finally, your goal is to make your workers' lives better.
#
It doesn't matter who help you with that, right?
#
So, you know, I've taken a lot of your time today,
#
but I'm going to take a little bit more of it.
#
I have three more questions for you.
#
And my third last question is from all the work
#
that you've done, are there any specific papers
#
or initiatives that you're particularly proud of
#
or that you think, you know, broke new ground
#
and you'd like to talk about?
#
And obviously in the show notes, I'll, you know,
#
link to your Google Scholar page
#
and all your studies and all of that.
#
But are there any particular ones
#
which you're really proud of?
#
I see, finally, all of them are out as research papers
#
and then it has seen their end goals.
#
But I don't think I'm proud of the papers that are published.
#
I'm more proud of the stories that I have gathered
#
I tell even the resource associates
#
and field associates whom I work with that,
#
every story is important.
#
Let's try to bring it out.
#
Why don't you write this, you know, as a story?
#
Why don't you write this as a blog and bring it out?
#
Someone, somebody, somewhere will read
#
and they get inspired by it.
#
We should, firms have taken time to tell us their issues.
#
Workers have taken their times out of the production
#
and told us their stories.
#
They were so, they have come forward to tell their stories.
#
Not everybody would want to do that, right?
#
And we should value that
#
and we should not lose these stories, right?
#
And I think, I really hope that one day
#
I'm able to sit and write all these stories out.
#
And I've been trying to do that.
#
I've tried to put it in different frameworks
#
and I've tried, I've started doing that.
#
But then I really want to bring out these stories.
#
Of course, I'll be doing all that number crunching.
#
I'm an econometrician, all that data analysis
#
and number crunching always fascinates me.
#
But then I also don't want to lose these stories.
#
And I'll be more proud when I bring out all these stories.
#
And so people, somewhere somebody will read it
#
and, you know, feels connected to it.
#
I can relate to this in my life.
#
You know, I can, I remember a person who went through this, right?
#
That's what I want to achieve.
#
You should write a book.
#
Are you planning to write a book?
#
You should write a book.
#
Just because I'm sitting on your podcast
#
doesn't make me eligible.
#
No, you're sitting on my podcast for the same reason
#
that you should write a book.
#
You know, the causation is the same root cause,
#
which is that you've done a lot of great work
#
and you have these great stories
#
which tell us so much about the country.
#
I would say that I'm not done.
#
If you if you just go by my publications or something,
#
it's not a lot of great work.
#
I mean, I'm not even one of those top economists or somewhere.
#
I'm so passionate about it.
#
And it's enough for me.
#
I don't have to be like, you know, in the top.
#
Something if it if I achieve that, that's fine.
#
But then that's not the that's not the aim that I want to do.
#
But I really want to learn every day.
#
And also my perspective,
#
my understanding of the world should get better every day.
#
That's what I want to do.
#
I feel like you're selling yourself short.
#
And I also feel like you because you've got all the stories,
#
you kind of take the stories for granted.
#
I think they're profoundly insightful.
#
You shared a few of them during this episode.
#
But I feel like we've just crashed the surface, actually.
#
I mean, how much can you cover in four hours?
#
So I'd really encourage you to, you know, write a book,
#
not because you want to get somewhere or be something,
#
but because it's just valuable to have this out there as part of the discourse.
#
My penultimate question, which is that we were just talking stories.
#
And what is a story that you tell yourself about your life and what you're doing now?
#
Like, what is your story about yourself?
#
What is the journey that you're on?
#
How do you see yourself spending the next 20, 30 years?
#
Not in terms of concrete things, but in a broader purpose kind of way.
#
Like, you know, what drives you?
#
Who are you? What do you do?
#
I know in a lot of ways how I feel.
#
Like, I feel I've been having a lot of these good people, goodwill
#
that people have given me.
#
Like, for instance, where people have guided me from one place to another,
#
where people have really shown interest in my growth
#
and said that, why don't you try this?
#
Like, for instance, one of my professors, I always go to him for the advice
#
and he tells me he only thinks from my side.
#
And then he says that these are the different things
#
you can think about how to evaluate situations.
#
And it is always okay to take a step back.
#
And for instance, Vidya made me get into writing part, right?
#
So every step, at every step, even now, like good business lab,
#
I feel that this organization is a great place,
#
which has encouraged me to be on my own and to do the work that I love.
#
So these are a lot of enabling factors, like my family, for instance,
#
especially my husband, I owe him a lot.
#
So they've been very enabling factors, right?
#
I think of people who have not got the support.
#
And this is where I really want to tell this story
#
because it's a very touching, it's something that changed my life forever.
#
So when I was growing up, there was also another person in my family,
#
extended family, very extended family.
#
Both of us were doing well in our studies.
#
And we were always compared because we were of similar age group.
#
She was a little younger than me, if I remember correctly.
#
So we were always compared.
#
And then we were like, oh, you're excelling in this, she's excelling in that.
#
She was a gold medalist in statistics.
#
And she also went on to do well.
#
But then her parents broke her journey after education.
#
And then once she got a job, she said, now it's time.
#
You're done with bachelors.
#
This is what we set as a goal for you, that we will get you educated to bachelors
#
and then we will get you married.
#
Most of the times, the women's goal itself is to get married.
#
The marriage is the end goal in a lot of women's lives.
#
So she got married, but she did not like her married life.
#
And so she wanted to divorce.
#
And that's when hell broke loose.
#
And at that time, I was continuing to do my PhD, right?
#
I went in to do my PhD.
#
And then she had got married and she was about to file her divorce papers and so on.
#
She had a younger sister as well.
#
So when she came back to her parents' house, there was so much pressure on her, right?
#
That because of you, your younger sister won't get married.
#
In fact, she had applied to do higher education in Australia
#
and she wanted to just move away from this society
#
where she is not scrutinized by anyone.
#
She's not looked down upon by anyone.
#
Imagine a person, she was a role model when she got her gold medal.
#
And the moment she decided to divorce,
#
she became now a person, a thing you want to hide away from others in the society.
#
That really drove her to the extent that she committed suicide.
#
That incident has stayed very much in my heart.
#
And what if I was in that place?
#
What if she was born in this family and I was born in that family?
#
Things could have been different.
#
What would I have been?
#
I would have not been sitting here maybe.
#
So I always think that.
#
And this is what keeps driving me.
#
Is there something that I can do and learn?
#
And I keep pushing myself so that I keep pushing those boundaries
#
and I keep learning every day.
#
And I owe it to all the people in my life who have taught me things,
#
who have influenced my life, even this person who's no more.
#
I owe it to her and I want to tell her stories.
#
And I want to tell people how unnecessarily we complicate others' lives
#
by having all these rules that don't make sense.
#
Like the pressure of marriage, the pressure of being a provider of the family for men,
#
the pressure of getting married for women.
#
So why do we have all these unnecessary constraints
#
and we impose on the society and then make people's lives so terrible?
#
This is what keeps me motivated.
#
And then how do we keep pushing those boundaries?
#
How do we make those small changes?
#
I don't know if I'm making changes,
#
but then I at least understand and try to take different perspectives.
#
I try to understand the constraints people come from.
#
This can help in also understanding why diversity is so important.
#
Having these people from different places,
#
from different backgrounds is so important.
#
They bring these new perspectives.
#
They can relate to a lot more problems, real-life problems.
#
They can always also come up with more innovative situations if given an opportunity.
#
So these are some of the things that I keep thinking about.
#
At least I'm learning about this even if I'm not changing anything about it.
#
So that keeps me motivated.
#
That really keeps me motivated.
#
And I would say learning is the motivation for me.
#
No, I think your work is awesome.
#
And just by speaking about it, I'm sure you're already influencing people.
#
I'm sure there are people listening to this who are inspired as indeed am I.
#
There's a lot of wisdom there.
#
So my final question, happier question for me and my listeners.
#
Recommend books, films, music, which you love,
#
which mean a lot to you and you want to share with all the world.
#
As I told you that the books that I've read are very...
#
I really wish that I read more and I also have read more in my childhood as well.
#
But right now I'm reading this book, Evicted.
#
This is about the evictions that happen in an American city
#
and it is written by a sociologist.
#
And it's a very great book.
#
I feel that so he goes to these people's homes and then he talks about
#
when they don't pay their rents, how they get evicted from their houses,
#
what happens to them, the legal processes behind it and so on.
#
It's so, it's so enriching.
#
And this is what I said that stories, people's stories,
#
the way you can connect to them.
#
So he's there and then he's recording all these conversations in real life.
#
And then that he has put as a story in this book.
#
And another book I got motivated again by is,
#
and which is when I started also looking into stories is Rukmini's,
#
you know, whole numbers and half truths,
#
where she says that behind every data, every numbers that you quote is a story.
#
And that story tells you much more complex things than the simple numbers can tell.
#
And I was so impressed by the story, for instance, on the rape cases, right?
#
She talks about like so many of the rape cases is mostly like,
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you know, it's on people whom the family knows.
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And it's motivated for different reasons other than actual rape that is happening.
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So that's when that's that's these are the kind of books that I really like.
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I do watch a lot of movies and especially those movies
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that bring the social issues to limelight.
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So like, for instance, I watched a lot of regional movies, Malayalam and Tamil.
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In space, specifically, I like Malayalam movies a lot.
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They bring a lot of these social issues.
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Actually, we take a very simple man's story and tell the things that he faces in life.
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So I know people would have known about the great Indian kitchen, right?
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That story is really like exactly tells from her point of view.
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So that kind of movies I watch a lot.
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In Tamil, you have this story.
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I don't know if you have heard this movie Pariyerum Perumal.
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It's about how much obstacles a disadvantaged caste group person has to face
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to even come to the level of college education
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and how much he has to lose before he comes to that level.
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So these stories that bring that connect to people that talk about ordinary people
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and are able to connect and tell the social issue
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just by telling an ordinary person's story is the most powerful, I feel.
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Yeah, I like these things a lot.
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May you long be storytelling and I hope we have many more conversations after this.
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I enjoyed myself so much.
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I thank you a lot for listening to me patiently.
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Some of the things that I've said may not be very profound,
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but the thing is I just shared the perspective from my perspective,
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how I've seen the world and everybody should have perspectives
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and people should learn and I feel that people should listen to other's perspectives.
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So that will broaden up our minds and just by listening to people,
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you can make your mind much more broader and understand each other's issues,
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even more complex social issues better.
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So thanks for giving me this time to share some of the stories
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that I myself have come across in my life or in other people's lives.
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I'm very, very happy to have this opportunity to share these things.
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Thank you for listening.
