Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:10

Hi, this is Siddhartha Ahluwalia, your host at NEON Show and managing partner at NEON Fund, a fund that invests in the best of enterprise AI and software companies between US-India corridor like Atomic Work, CloudSek and Spotdraft and 57 other such companies like that.

Today I have with me Subroto Bagchi Sir, one of the co-founders of Mindtree and author of The Day the Chariot Moved. So Subrata Sir, welcome on the NEON show. Thank you.

Glad to be here. There is an interesting story like Munitiga in the book. Can you describe that story?

Subroto Bagchi 1:51

So, when I crossed over and joined the government, I was coming back to Odisha after 40 years. I was in the IT industry and gone away from Odisha for 40 years. That’s a long time.

My understanding with Mr. Naveen Patnaik was that for the first 30 days, he will not see me. And those first 30 days, I wanted to see all the 30 districts of Odisha by road, so to get a sense of what’s happening on the ground. And in the heat of the month of May 2016, the mercury was hitting 45-48, I traveled all the 30 districts.

And through that, I covered 3000 kilometers. Just to give you the context, that’s almost the length and almost the breadth of India from one end to the other end. So, as I journeyed, I was actually, I visited several skill training institutions.

And everywhere, people talked about the fact that they have a lathe machine, they have a building, they have 10 acres of land, and they don’t have peons, and they don’t have clerks. And the measures were wrong, the comparators were wrong, and it all ended up with whining. So, at some point in time, I told the principals of these institutions that don’t sing this song to me.

Instead, I told them to tell me what I call a 10-6-4-2 formula. So, I said, you are a training institution, you’re an educational institution. And educational institutions can be measured only by its output, which is students.

So, tell me the names of 10 students that you’re proud of. These ITIs and IITs were conceptualized in 1950s. So, some ITIs, which are meant to create blue collar and now brown collar workers, are 50 years, 60 years, 25 years, 10 years old.

So, that’s a long enough period for you to tell me the names of 10 students you’re proud of. Of these, you have to tell me the name of six who have made a name outside the state. And of these 10, you have to tell me the names of four girls, because girls don’t join ITIs, and girls, as yet, don’t join polytechnics in big numbers.

So, girls are very important to me. And then of these 10, you have to tell me the names of two students who didn’t join the job queue and started a tiny little business in the town, in the village where they belong. And they perhaps engage one and a half employees or two employees.

So, this was the 10-6-4-2 formula. So, I would visit every ITI, every skill institution and challenge them. So, that kind of threw people off gear.

And people had difficulty telling me 10 names to begin with. And then they started telling me the names. And then I would stop them and say, not just the name, you have to tell me which village they came from, what their parents did, how did they discover you, what did they do here, what did they learn here, and where are they now.

Because my desire was to get those people back as role models, make the ITIs and skill training institutions aspirational. Because kids who come in there, they begin by concluding that they’re failures in life. So, I needed to hold them up to make it aspirational.

So, coming to Munitiga, she was 4 out of 10. And many of these institutions struggled. Till I came to this place called ITI Bargarh and asked the principal, so tell me the name of a girl you’re proud of.

And he didn’t, he couldn’t. So, one trainer said, sir, long time ago, there was a girl called Munitiga. So, I said, tell me more.

And turns out that she was an Adivasi girl. And her father had died. She heard about this ITI after her 10th class and studied electronics there.

So, I said, where is Munitiga now? So, they said that she is a locomotive pilot of the Indian Railways. I fell off my chair.

So, she was my first star, actually. So, I want to talk to her right now. The power of being in the government is that if you want to talk to somebody, that person can be tracked down in under 10 minutes.

Even in a country of 1.4 billion people, government is so powerful. So, under 10 minutes, I was on the phone with Munitiga. Munitiga didn’t know who I was.

So, I said, tell me about you. So, she told me in Hindi.

I am Munitiga. I am a locomotive pilot in Indian railways. These days I am posted in Bhubaneshwar. Everyday I take the Intercity express from Khordha to Palasa and back. Now, that is intergenerational change.

So, Munitiga became my star from that point onwards because to me, first and foremost, skill is not about just employment. Skill is about human transformation. We need to embrace that.

So, when you look at human transformation, when Munitiga hauls a locomotive engine, three generations after her, their trajectory will become very different. When Munitiga hauls a WAP 7 locomotive engine of Indian Railways, it’s very unlikely that she will be actually bullshitted by in-laws or a drunkard husband who will ill-treat her. So, that’s what skill gives to you.

So, skills are about human transformation and more than anything else, when we skill somebody, we give them identity. So, Munitiga is no longer an Adivasi girl from a nondescript village from somewhere deep inside Odisha. So, she is a locomotive pilot.

That’s her identity. So, skills give us identity. So, that’s Munitiga and I realized that skill development is so critical for a country like India at the bottom of the pyramid.

But if you can skill a girl child, then you release power to the universe.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 9:08

And can you describe a couple of more powerful stories because I’m really moved by the story of Munitiga and I believe my listeners would also be having the same once they listen to this conversation.

Subroto Bagchi 9:20

Well, you know that nice t-shirt you’re wearing and the shirt that I’m wearing and certainly the trousers we’re wearing, chances are very high that they come from a tiny municipal town in India in Tamil Nadu called Tirupur. Now, Tirupur is the Bangalore equivalent of the garment export industry. A few years back, Tirupur actually is a municipal town, not even a city.

It produced almost like six billion dollars of garment exports for India. It’s done by close to 600,000 workers. Half of them are from Tamil Nadu and half of them are migrant workers from Bihar and Chhattisgarh, UP and Odisha.

So, out of that half, 50% come from Odisha and 98% of garment workers are women who are school dropouts. So, when you wear an H&M product or a Tommy Hilfiger or you wear a pair of, you know, Dockers, chances are an Odia girl has touched that before he has adorned you. Should you look at mannequins in Madrid and in Paris and in Barcelona and in New York and London, the cloth, the dress draping the mannequin could be from Tirupur, might have been touched with the hands of an Odia worker.

So, where is the story going? The story where it is going is the average garment worker who’s a girl comes there because she needs to get married and the family can’t afford it. Typically, you need a lakh, lakh and a half to get married.

And if you’re not married, you’re a girl in India, it’s very unsafe. You’re a liability to your family and you want to raise your own family. So, they come, take up these jobs and work for a year, two years and then go back.

So, sometimes it’s not about getting married, sometimes because, you know, typically in villages in India, at the age of 50, people stop working. So, father stopped working, his father is 50. Sometimes the debt, the family is deep in debt, the brother doesn’t do anything, brother wants a mobile phone, a cell phone and a bike.

So, this girl comes because a debt has to be repaid, because there’s an alcoholic father or the father has run away and it’s just mother and couple of siblings. So, they come from very difficult background and they start to build life for themselves and their families. It’s very difficult.

So, there I met Basanti Pradhan in Tirupur. So, this lady, you know, what endeared me to her is I was born in a tiny little place in a government house with no electricity and water in a place called Patnagar and she came from a village near there. So, it immediately, you know, made her very special to me.

Now, Basanti Pradhan was a goat herd. Her father reared goat and she was, you know, one of seven daughters. So, in the villages, you are desperate to have a son.

So, she was actually number three and she fell off education after a 10th class and she was rearing goats. So, the eldest daughter got married, all the money that was there was spent on that. When it was the turn of the second daughter, there was no money left.

So, she told her parents that I have to go and work and she went to a training center run by an organization called ILFS, got trained as a garment worker, came to Tirupur. In Tirupur, within years, few years, she became a production supervisor. Okay.

So, I asked Basanti Pradhan, you know, what does it take to start life as an ordinary worker and become a production supervisor in the company that she was working for. So, she sat me down and for half an hour, she told me about 20 qualities you need to rise up in life and I was saying, wow, so this could be a talk delivered in ISB or in IIM Bangalore or any of the IIMs for that matter on what does it take to succeed in life. So, she told me that first of all, you have to be very good at your work, obviously.

Then she told me that you need to know the total process, not just where you fit in the total process. Then she talked about ability to not just build yourself but build teams. Then she says that not just teams but you need to be actually adding value to competing teams because on one hand, her production group is competing with other production groups but she said to me that they need to succeed together for the company to succeed.

Okay. Then she talked to me about empathy. She said you need to know your fellow workers and people who come in to be trained by you and you need to know where they come from, what are the drivers.

So, Basanti Pradhan, who once herded goats, okay, who comes to Tirupur and becomes a production supervisor. Now you say this is India, that is Bharat. How many people know about people like this?

So, I met Sumathi Naik. I met her in West Side, Bengaluru, off Commercial Street. Sumathi Naik was again a 10th class film, joined a government program called Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana, D-D-O-G-K-Y for short.

She was trained to be a retail assistant. So, when you go to a mall next time, pay attention to who’s selling you a shirt, who’s selling a watch, who’s selling a perfume, who’s selling a book, who’s selling you a mobile phone. Now these are people who come from hinterland India, many times school dropouts or just 10th class pass, went through a training program, short term, sometimes long term, and probably work for a company like Team Lease or Quess, and they are deployed.

So, they are not employed many times by the shop, but they’re employed by a Team Lease or a Quest or wherever else. So, when I came to West Side, I was meeting people like Sumathi Naik and her cohorts who trained in Odisha under D-D-O-G-K-Y to see how they’re settling down, how they’re coping, how they’re building their lives. And while interacting, the manager, the general manager actually, showed me, you know, gestured towards her and showed me where Sumathi Naik was standing and said, Sir, you have to watch out for this girl because one day she’s going to take my job.

And I said, wow, and I thought it’s an exaggeration. I said, what do you mean? So, he said that when Sumathi came here, she only knew Odia and this, you know, smattering of Hindi.

But when she, you know, started working here, she learned how to speak Kannada, she became fluent in Hindi, she learned English, and now she’s multilingual. And so, Sumathi Naik was meant to take his job away. And I said, this is great.

But within a year of that, Sumathi Naik sent me a photograph of a new badge. She had been sent to West Side Coimbatore and that badge said Department Manager. I met countless such people.

I met girls who were, I’m talking about girls, I can talk about boys as well, but girls are very special to me. So, I met, you know, 10th class pass girls from Hinterland, Odisha, who actually build Boeing aircraft bodies for Tata Advanced Systems Limited. So, in Hyderabad, the TASL, as they make aircraft bodies.

Now, this is sophisticated work. So, you know, these girls and boys, they come from Hinterland, India. And, you know, we don’t associate them with building a Boeing aircraft.

So, next time you fly Indigo, or you fly, you know, some other airline, and it happens to be a Boeing aircraft or a Pilatus aircraft, the chances are an ODI worker built it for you.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 19:15

These are amazing stories. And the kind of pride that I see and delight I see in your eyes on narrating these stories, are they more powerful than your Mindtree experience?

Subroto Bagchi 19:30

Oh, any day, absolutely. You know, Mindtree defined me. I don’t think you’d be speaking to me if Mindtree had not happened.

 

Mindtree is the joy and the beauty of my life. But as I told you before, in the private sector, if you are able to push something by a millimeter, you make an inch of progress. With the government, if you can push something by a millimeter, if you can, then your progress that you make is a mile long.

 

Joy of that is very different. In Mindtree, you’re dealing with engineers mostly, right? If you’re an engineer, you work with a company like Mindtree, Infosys, TCS, whatever, you’re already privileged in a country like India.

 

But when you see Munitiga, you meet Sumathi Naik, you truly understand the power of India and the frustrations. I only told you the success stories, and there are very difficult stories of people who are trying hard and they barely come up to the surface level and they fall apart. So for one, Basanti Pradhan, there are dozens of girls who come in a garment factory, wherever, many other production places.

 

And somebody says, give me your savings, I’ll make a double in under a year. It could be a friendly guy from your village. It could be another girl whose cousin, brother is actually in the chit fund business.

 

And this girl hands over that lakh of rupees. And the next thing you know is that the money is gone. So there are difficult stories.

 

I met workers who are trained. And you know, if you get skilled trained, it’s unlikely that you will be able to find employment where you belong. So you’ll go to a metro.

 

So I met these girls who are trained in so-called leather technology, but end up in a shoe factory in Bahadurgarh leather park. And I met these people there. And I asked those cohort of girls as to what was the most difficult thing, what was the challenge in making the transition from a village to Bahadurgarh.

 

And I expected to hear that they will say, you know, the culture, they will say safety, they’ll talk about food. But no, it was none of that. They said, we can’t drink the water here.

 

Why they can’t drink the water here? Because in Bahadurgarh, there is no water. It is only groundwater that you can find from a deep well.

 

And that water is putrid, that’s polluted. We take this water for granted. Okay.

 

You walk into a conference room, there’s bottled water available. You don’t worry about the quality of water you’re drinking. But here are these young men and women from the rural parts of India, where they probably didn’t have three meals a day, but the air was clean, and they could drink the water.

 

But in Bahadurgarh, they’re earning enough money to afford two meals a day. But imagine you eat your food, but you can’t wash it down because you can’t drink the water. So, for all the great stories, success stories were told, I also saw life in all its starkness that I won’t have seen in the bubble, within the bubble, within the bubble.

 

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 23:29

And can you tell us more about your eight years of being a public servant, what work you did? You were almost at a position of a cabinet minister.

 

Subroto Bagchi 23:37

Yeah. So, I was given the status, as they call it, the rank and status of a cabinet minister. That was essentially to signal the seriousness of the state.

 

And also, it was essential to give agency so that people took me seriously. It happened in 2016, when I was just stepping down from Maitri as its executive chairman. And within four days of that, Deanship Minister Naveen Patnaik called me and said whether I could come and set up the Odisha Skill Development Authority.

 

So, the charter was to do skill development, mostly at the bottom of the pyramid. And my whole world was to create employable skills. At that time, for 1.2 million young people, most of them school dropout. So, my target group was basically, mostly 80% of them were people who would drop off after their fifth, eighth, and the 10th class, or before the 10th class. And 20% of my audience was kids who have passed the 10th and would now go into what’s called an ITI or a polytechnic. So, that was my new universe.

 

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 25:13

And during this podcast, we will discuss various life stories of you and the people related with you. So, can you describe Mr. Naveen Patnaik as, because he was a CEO in his own right, a CEO of a state. How did you knew him, your experience working with him, and some of the transformations that he brought in the state of Odisha.

 

Subroto Bagchi 25:36

So, first of all, I didn’t know him. You know, I knew of him. I had no past association, and I had nothing to do with politics.

 

Mindtree started its global learning center in Bhubaneswar. It was called Mindtree Kalinga at one point in time. That was when the government of Odisha was courting IT companies to come and set up campuses.

 

So, during the course of that, he came for the foundation stone laying, and then he came to inaugurate it. So, it was a very polite interaction during that time. It didn’t build any familiarity.

 

Then what happened was, I stepped down from Mindtree on 31st March 2016. And on 2nd April, I had a talk to deliver at the behest of the Odisha government. This is called Odisha Knowledge Forum, and they typically bring all the top bureaucrats together and get somebody who’s from the outside world to talk on eclectic set of subjects.

 

So, it was the third edition of the Odisha Knowledge Hub. And on 2nd April, I delivered that talk. Prior to me, Raghuram Rajan was one of the speakers, and Nachiket Mor.

 

I was a third in that series. I didn’t realize that when I was talking to the top bureaucrats, a feed was made available to the chief minister’s room. He never sits in this because he wants his officers to have a free-willing, no inhibitions kind of interaction.

 

So, unknown to me, he was listening to the whole talk. This is 2nd April 2016. And 4th April, I got a phone call from him saying, would I come and be part of the government’s initiative to set up the Odisha Skill Development Authority.

 

He basically said two things. He said, the state needs you. This was his language.

 

And second thing he said is that all the resources that you require will be made available to you. And so, we thought about it for a couple of weeks with me and my wife Sushmita, weighing the pros and cons. Because in doing something like this, very limited script available that you can use, not too many narratives.

 

So, I decided I’ll take the opinion of four people. First, of course, Sushmita. Who’s been my life partner.

 

Then I said that I’ll speak to Manish Sabharwal of Teamlease. Because he understood the whole world of skill development and I had no understanding of it. And the third person I decided to talk to was Nandan Nilekani because he, among all of us, had previous experience working with government.

 

And the fourth was my brother, who used to be a bureaucrat in government of Odisha. So, he was an IAS officer, retired long back as Chief Secretary of the state. So, he knew the intricacies there.

 

And the decision I took is, if any of these four people said no, I’ll not do it. But as luck would have it, each one of them said, yes, I should be doing it. And so, after two weeks, we decided, Mr. Sushmita and I. And the third week, I said yes to Mr. Naveen Patnaik. We packed four suitcases, closed our house in Bangalore and we crossed over.

 

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 29:21

And can you describe those eight years and what made you stick for those eight years and the experience of working with Mr. Naveen Patnaik and the broader team?

 

Subroto Bagchi 29:31

More than working with Mr. Naveen Patnaik, as I was telling you, he gave me a free hand. It was working with people at the bottom of the pyramid. That was exciting.

 

My entire life has been inspired by the possibility of making ordinary people achieve extraordinary things. And I did it in many ways when I was building Mindtree, prior to Mindtree, some of my best years were the 10 years that I spent in Wipro, so all that was good. But the excitement of being part of a government is you get to work with people at a very different scale. And, you know, I sensed the high, you talk about those eight years.

 

I sensed the high, felt the high, lived the high because I was telling some people the other day that in the private sector, if you push something by a millimeter, you make progress worth an inch. But if you can push things by a millimeter as part of the government, then you can go a mile long. So that is a dimensional, you know.

 

So if you’re looking at transformative change, and you’re part of a government, and you have the right empowerment, you have the right agency, then it is just mind-boggling as to how much of impact you can create. And some of the impact can be intergenerational.

 

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 31:11

And why did you name the book, The Day the Chariot Moved?

 

Subroto Bagchi 31:15

You know, the interesting thing about choosing titles is that you don’t choose them. So they suddenly come, and they coalesce together, and they speak to you. So the words all came together, and they spoke to me.

 

And I realized that this name is a perfect name for a book like this because, you know, the chariot is an inert thing, any chariot sitting by itself. And then people come, people who don’t know each other, people necessarily who have no previous connection, and they’re brought together by a sense of purpose. And they start pulling.

 

First one person, then 10 people, then 100 people, then thousands of people. And they pull without a script, without supervision. And they have a sense of calling.

 

And then kinetic energy takes over. And the chariot starts moving. The chariot and people become one.

 

And great progress then gets made. The excitement of pulling the chariot isn’t pulling, not sitting on top of the chariot. So you look at public transformation at scale, or for that matter, transformative work at scale, it involves everybody.

 

It requires that sense of purpose. And, you know, it has a certain magic. And there’s a starting point, you know, there’s a point where an inert thing, like a static chariot, then starts moving.

 

So that’s how the name came up, The Day The Chariot Moved.

 

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 33:24

And how have these stories during these eight years changed you as a person now?

 

Subroto Bagchi 33:31

It’s difficult to summarize that. I can only tell you that, you know, I feel humble. I feel responsible.

 

I feel lucky. I feel blessed that I was able to engage with these people. Each day, I learned something different.

 

You know, how many of people watching this podcast would have heard about words called stunting and westing? India is the stunting and westing capital of the world. 46% of Indian kids have malnutrition.

 

46%. And when you have early childhood malnutrition, it affects your learning capability, your judgmental capability. The brain does not develop after the age of eight.

 

And the brain requires protein. So till the age of eight, if you are protein deficient, they’ll not be able to do math, you’ll not be able to have linguistic capability. You have the capability to connect the dots, which is essential in life.

 

So I didn’t know about the words called stunting and westing. I didn’t know about terms like DDU-GKY or PMKVY. I didn’t pay attention to the fact, you go to a hospital, you go to Manipal Hospital, you go to Fortis, you go to Apollo.

 

I said, you know, if you ever got admitted or your near and dear one got admitted there, you’re only focused on the doctor. You don’t ask yourself, where did the nurse come from? How did that nurse take on this job?

 

You don’t even realize that a hospital is not about doctors and nurses. It’s about the bedside attendant, and what is called the general duty assistant. The person who is pushing your wheelchair, the person who is handling the stretcher, the person who is making the bed for the patient, changing the diapers, handling the bedpan, preparing a patient to go to the OT.

 

Where do these people come from? Where do these people go? They get trained.

 

These are mostly school dropouts or maybe 10th class pass. They go through a training program for 45 days, 60 days, and then they come here to become bedside attendants. You know, the combined market cap of Swiggy and Zomato is about $23 billion.

 

Who’s the Swiggy delivery boy? Who’s the Zomato delivery guy? What are they escaping to come to a big city to deliver your pizza?

 

What happens to them? You have no understanding. You have no clue.

 

So every day I learned something different about my country. It changes your perceptions. It changes your latitude and longitude.

 

Does that make sense?

 

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 37:10

And as you said, most of the people who are living in urban cities and are fortunate to be in IT sector or whatever sector, they haven’t seen the real India.

 

Subroto Bagchi 37:23

Yeah, very interestingly. So the real India is Bharat. The small India, small subset is India.

 

And those of us who live in India, we think the role of Bharat is to serve us. We don’t see our role as serving Bharat. So as long as your supply of meds and security guards and your fresh food, you know, delivered on your table is there, you know, Bharat justifies itself.

 

We don’t see us as responsible for that. So during COVID, India had a refugee problem. Nobody calls it a refugee problem.

 

It was one of the largest mass exodus when workers from the metros, they walked, cycled, sat on trucks and trailers, Shamik Expresses, to go back to where they come from. It was one of the, as I said, largest single mass exoduses in this civilization called India. We’ve promptly forgotten that.

 

But they make our lives tick. If you and me are sitting on this podcast today, they are there behind the scene. There is a ghost you will not see.

 

Till the fresh food is not served on your table, till your driver has vanished, till the maid has not reported today.

 

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 39:14

I am quite moved by listening to these stories because I myself come from a tier two town called Meerut. So I have seen not as closely as you have, but I’ve seen the nearby villages of Meerut called Mawana and Hapur.

 

Subroto Bagchi 39:32

I know where Hapur is.

 

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 39:36

But as we grow up, we eventually, you know, between our struggles and our growth, keep on forgetting what happens in real Bharat and how much, you know, the effort does it take for a chai at our cup to get made at the Bharat level.

 

Subroto Bagchi 40:01

So simple thing, you know, next time you catch a flight and you want to use the washroom and you’re very delighted that the washroom at the JMR airport is squeaky clean, right? And inside that washroom, you’ll find a person standing whose job is to clean after you. Sometimes that person actually shows you in and offers you a hand towel or whatever.

 

You don’t pause to realize that it’s an eight hour job. So eight hours, you are in a public toilet. You don’t see the connection.

 

You don’t pause to think where this person has come from, where this person will go. We have to be responsible. We can’t say that I’m fine.

 

I have my apartment and I’m not focused on buying another apartment. I’m in an apartment. I now need to go to a gated community.

 

My kid is going to a good school, okay? And I’m worried about whether my kid is going to crack in NEET or, you know, JEE or whatever it is. I’m good in my own world.

 

But next time you see this person, next time you see the general duty assistant in the five-star hospital that you go to, next time you go to a mall and buy that expensive watch or perfume, pause, talk to that guy. And next time this Swiggy guy or Zomato guy comes in, make eye contact, smile, tip that person a little better, put yourself in that person’s shoes and ask yourself, you know, how much is enough?

 

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 42:03

And you talk about this ground reality and the other projected reality is that India today is probably the fourth largest economy in the world, four trillion dollars. So, where is the dissonance?

 

Subroto Bagchi 42:19

The dissonance is an inequality, okay? I think we should stop beating our chest about becoming four trillion dollars, becoming, going from fourth to this third to the second. I think development must have equity.

 

You cannot be skewed. India is skewed. We have made great progress.

 

We have made great progress. I think there was an India before 1990, economic liberalization took place. And then India that, you know, that evolved, started taking shape after 1990s.

 

And the kind of infrastructural progress that India has made, the kind of, you know, consumer power that today India has, the kind of economic consolidation, aggregation that happens that makes India a significant player in the world economy, in world politics is very significant. But equally significant is the fact that the disparities are dismal. So, you know, there are food delivery people everywhere in the world.

 

There are Uber drivers and Lyft drivers everywhere in the world. But what makes it different in a country like India and the developed countries is the quality of life that Uber driver can have, has in a developed country versus what happens here. The respect that a skilled worker gets in a country like India is dismal.

 

The kind of nutritional deficit India has compared to other countries is dismal. So, I think it is important to have humility. It’s important not to get carried away with $4 trillion.

 

We need to say, is everybody progressing? Is everybody growing together? So, I’ll tell you, you know, in 1990s, I used to work for Mr. Azeem Premji, and he sent me to Japan to understand total quality management. So, I visited many Japanese factories, and most Japanese plants are actually run on the strength of its workers who are typically school passouts. So, every Japanese plant I went to, I asked, what is the wage differential between the worker on the shop floor and the head of the plant? And consistently, I was told it’s one is to six.

 

I come to India and ask the same question. It’s unsettling to know that even today, 94% of Indian workers, they are in the, what is called the unorganized sector. Only 6% Indians work in the organized sector.

 

That may be 6%, 7%, whatever, you know, based on how you counted. But more than 90%, really closer to 94%, come from the unorganized sector, the sector with which, you know, I was engaged. What does it mean?

 

It means zero job security. It means no health coverage. It means no leave.

 

It means no career progression. And it means that when COVID hits, you stamper. It means that the drinking water is not drinkable.

 

It means you’re far away from the grid. So, then let’s talk about women. It’s very sobering to know that amidst the women who are in the workforce, okay, job workforce, 94% of women in the job workforce, they are actually in the unorganized sector.

 

So, if you’re a man, and you get your wages paid in cash, which means zero job security, you have no health security, you do not have a career progression of any kind. It’s one set of challenge. When you’re a woman, it gets multiplied 10x, 20x, 40x.

 

So, if India, it’s less important for India to be a $4 trillion economy. It’s more important for the food delivery guy to wear better clothes, to eat better, not just give you and me, you know, food delivered under 10 minutes. Even today, an ITI student graduates and gets paid 10,000 rupees, mostly in cash.

 

The equivalent of ITI in Singapore is called ITE. When an ITE person graduates from ITE after the same two years of vocational training, the starting salary is $34,000 Singapore dollars. When you graduate from a polytechnic in Singapore, the starting salary is $36,000 Singapore dollars.

 

When you are graduating as an engineer from the National University of Singapore, $37,000 Singapore dollars. You can build a future with $34,000 Singapore dollars. You can raise a family, you can get married, you can get health benefits.

 

10,000 rupees, you get displaced from Meerut and from Bhubaneswar and from Coimbatore, you come to a city, you become a slum dweller. So, we need to build an India that is significantly more equitable. And the responsibility for that is those who are in India for those who are in Bharat.

 

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 49:08

And your understanding of policy making, how did it change during these eight years? Like as you initially said during the beginning of the podcast, our perception of the government is sluggard, is corrupt and it doesn’t want any change. Example, Bangalore is the GDP capital of Karnataka and also maybe in some way of India also in some sense, but you see the quality of infrastructure here.

 

Subroto Bagchi 49:34

Yeah. So, we think that for all failures, it’s the government that is responsible. We don’t pause and say that society is responsible.

 

We certainly don’t pause and say, I’m responsible. So, who is clogging the Bangalore road? I am clogging the Bangalore road.

 

Okay. Who is causing the sewage mess of Bangalore? I’m causing it.

 

Who is causing the strain on the medical system? I’m causing it. I have a role to fulfil.

 

So, you know, when we want the COVID shot, okay, then for a fleeting moment, till the jab goes in, we think and probably thank the government, right? But it’s policy makers who made that happen. So, we’re talking about the stereotypes, actually slot of corruption.

 

There is slot, there is corruption, but it’s a societal problem. So, there was a time when the politician was corrupt. The bureaucrat was not corrupt.

 

Then there was a time when the many bureaucrats became corrupt. But now we are entering a time where society is corrupt. So, demonetization happened, right?

 

Society is back in business. Even today, you want to buy and sell real estate, educated people want money in cash and educated people pay money in cash. You go to buy anything, you know, anything above maybe 5,000, 10,000 rupees, the guy will say, do you want a bill or you don’t want a bill?

 

And you say, what’s the difference? The guy says, bill lenge toh GST lag jayega. I say, no, no, no, bill ka zarurat nahi hai.

 

So, we blame the government too easily for the ills that are social problems. But coming to policymaking, this country still runs because 10% of politicians are fantastic people. This country still runs because 20% of bureaucrats have not sold themselves.

 

So, they’re both efficient and incorruptible. So, you can have four kinds of government officials. You can have those who are neither efficient nor corrupt, okay?

 

Neither efficient nor corrupt. So, they’re parasites. They have retired from the service without notifying the government.

 

And then there are those people who are very corrupt and inefficient. They’re criminals. And then there are some people who are, you know, who are not corrupt but reasonably efficient.

 

Okay? But a very small subset is there which is neither corrupt nor inefficient. They’re highly efficient and incorruptible.

 

The country runs because of them. They are making the policy. If you look at the size of India, the size of the problem, and big problems require big solutions.

 

And the term policy is very interesting. It is something that causes transformation at scale. It infuses intergenerational change.

 

It happens because of some very enlightened people, very committed people. So, we need to break the stereotypes that we have in our mind. And you look at the kind of things that the government does.

 

You know, we complain about the civic failure in Bangalore city because we think that that’s our birthright. And if you look at the defense of the country of India, it is, you know, it’s exciting for brief spells like Operation Sindoor. Okay?

 

And it’s nice movie watching. You eat popcorn, relax in your couch, and you are watching a very patriotic movie. But who’s running the defense services?

 

The government that’s running defense. One day, there was somebody who was ranting in a public forum about the failures of government, and I couldn’t take it anymore. And I asked that person, so tell me one thing, who gave you your first inoculation?

 

The guy said, how is it relevant to this conversation? The conversation was about government’s failure in skill development. I said, no, no, it’s relevant.

 

Because the first jab you took, okay, was made available by government for which government didn’t charge you money. The first TABC injection you had, the first polio shot you took, okay, the first smallpox vaccination that you took, it was delivered to you by the government, wherever you may be in the remotest part of India, for which the government didn’t charge you money. And you are standing here, ranting and venting against the government, because without those shots, you won’t be standing here.

 

So, who conceptualized that? Who delivers the last mile that makes it happen? COVID happened, lockdown happened.

 

Who ran the law and order? While you were locked in your apartment for one year, six months, two years. And, you know, while you and me, you know, we had our three meals a day, and our breakfast and our, you know, endless cups of tea and coffee and everything else.

 

The supply chain at work, that supply chain was not being made possible by the private sector. That supply chain was made possible by the government. Which the government works.

 

Right now, you and me are doing this podcast, because the lighting system is working, because, you know, the government is in charge of the production and distribution efficiently of energy. You look at, you know, the educational system, we complain so much. More than 90% of kids still go to a government school.

 

The last mile of any delivery is happening because the government is at work. So, government works.

 

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 57:29

So, then why, you know, at one point of time, you are saying that there are people in Odisha and places, 90% of India was not getting equitable opportunities, right? And the other point you are saying the government is working. So, what, again, where’s the dissonance that I’m hearing?

 

Subroto Bagchi 57:52

So, the dissonance is in terms of, dissonance is at many levels, okay? The dissonance is happening because of inequitable development. And that’s happening because I think it requires a lot more engagement.

 

Engagement of, engagement by people, okay? Like you and me. It requires, of course, it requires enlightened politicians, it requires more committed bureaucrats and so on.

 

But in many ways, it also is a civilizational issue. For India to come here, it has taken thousands of years. And for this India to transform itself into a more equitable India, we have challenges that will take probably more than a lifetime.

 

So, we need to take a civilizational view. We need to have patience. But in the meantime, people who are in positions of comfort, okay, the haves, we have to fulfill our obligations in a more significant way, more intense way.

 

Because we need to see that for our successive generations to succeed, the whole of India needs to succeed.

 

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 59:18

So, when I was planning for this podcast, my goal was to make it 60% of this podcast, your mind tree journey, and 40% focus on the book. But I’m delighted the outcome came out to be 100% focused on the work that you have been doing in the last nine years.

 

Subroto Bagchi 59:39

I’m delighted too. But at the same time, I must tell you the joy of conversations like this. The joy is, you know, there’s a script and there’s the unscript.

 

That’s true of life as well. That is essentially what I define as the power of emergence. We get too focused on what we want to achieve, but there’s an emergence that is waiting to happen. And great things are achieved when we listen to the call of emergence. When we open the window into possibilities, we let go where the energy wants to go.

 

So, what we did, you and me, is we allowed the energy to flow the way it wanted to flow. And hopefully, that led to an interesting, informative, instructive, and nice conversation.

 

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:00:40

Yeah, I would like to conclude here. If you promise me another podcast on the Mindtree journey, because I’m very curious about it as an entrepreneur, not for the listeners. Of course, I want it for the listeners.

 

But if you promise me another podcast on the Mindtree journey and the lessons from it.

 

Subroto Bagchi 1:00:56

You know, you told me that some of your best podcasts have crossed a million views. Yes. So, here’s the deal.

 

If this podcast gets a million views, okay, then we’ll do that.

 

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:01:09

Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much, sir.

 

It’s been such a delight. Thank you. Absolutely.

 

It’s such a pleasure getting this conversation go unscripted completely. I don’t know what real issues need to be discussed.

 

Subroto Bagchi 1:01:22

And I hope people get to read The Day The Chariot Moved to be inspired, not with my voice. But every page on this book has a voice of, you know, people at the bottom of the pyramid. It’ll lift you up.

 

It’ll give you a new purpose in life. It’ll make you engaged. And together we can, we will, we shall.

 

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:01:45

Thank you. I would say that, you know, go read this book for the Munitiga story. The story of so many others, you know, who you can play a role in, you know, if you can, you know, let another Munitiga flourish.

 

Thank you so much, sir.

 

Subroto Bagchi 1:02:02

Thank you very much. Thank you.