Tech Campuses and Trickle Down Economics
I had just hurriedly completed scribbling down my credentials into the ledger at the desk under the watchful eye of the security personnel formally dressed. I was then asked to stand with my back facing a white wall for my picture to be taken. Within minutes I was given a badge with my snap and allowed into the clearing.
The atmosphere that greeted me was pleasantly different with lush greenery everywhere I turned. Shortly afterwards, a small electric buggy drew up beside me to transport me to the nearest building. This was the I.T. Campus of the Tech Giant Infosys in the city of Hyderabad, India in the year 2007.
The 2000’s rebooted the Indian I.T. services sector soon after the Year 2000 (Y.2.K.) threat ended in a whimper. Homegrown I.T. firms such as Infosys, Wipro, T.C.S, H.C.L and many others saw it fit to ratchet up their numbers in India to take advantage of the pool of low cost talent. Soon, the other Global Giants such as I.B.M, Accenture, Oracle, H.P.E, Microsoft and even Google followed suit.
In fact, at one stage I.B.M. had more employees in India than it had anywhere else in the world. To attract the best talent and to make the low cost model work over a large numbers, campuses were built across multiple cities in India. The Infosys campus I was visiting that day in 2007 was one of its largest. It was sprawling, akin to most of its other I.T. campuses across the country. You could see carefully crafted pathways, well trimmed shrubs, foliage at almost every nook and corner and air that was fresh enough to fool you into thinking that global warming was a myth.
The conference was in a huge hall with ergonomic seating and the best of acoustics. During the break, there were a few coffee vending machines located at various corners in the same floor of the building!! The cafeteria was spacious enough to hold the multitude of suited professionals who didn’t need to elbow each other at the food counters.
As part of this conference, we had to break out into different rooms for discussions. Discussions in 2007 meant high-end printers at nearly every corner and an almost endless supply of paper. Boardrooms with Voice over IP(V.o.I.P.) Phones that looked so elegant on those stylish mahogany-rosewood tables but hid a web of criss-crossed wires beneath the surface.
Tech Campuses hosted thousands of professionals from all over with dreams as high as the sky who were ever eager to code their way into a better future. The Campus also had an equally important ecosystem, its unseen scaffolding. These were the maids, cleaners, cooks, drivers, security guards and many more who were drawn to the cities with the hope of an better livelihood.
It worked for everyone. This was indeed a very good run.
But then .. races don’t go on forever ..
Just like the Oil Shock of the 1970’s, we somehow always knew that the possibility of a bio shock was floating around the corner, airborne and waiting to strike despite the several alarm bells that were sounded early on. A virus that seemed to have originated in bats has now crossed over to humans thanks to our close contact with animals and the need to have animal protein served on our dining table.
Enter the new world of lock-downs and shutters-down, of empty streets and barren parks, of men in make-shift masks that walk with a brisk pace while keeping their eyes down, trying to breathe in as little air as possible!!
The bunch of us who have managed to transport our professional lives to our bedroom (which has that work table we ordered from Amazon one day with a large discount but thought we would never use) are considered to be fortunate. The not so fortunate are those whose livelihoods have been put on a worrying pause and now face an uncertain future.
A few days ago some of these major Tech Giants in India announced a new normal that could almost be as disruptive as the Covid Virus itself. I.T. behemoth T.C.S. boldly declared that it doesn’t need more than 25% of its workforce in office at any point of time to be 100% productive. Elsewhere across the world, both Google and Twitter have made it compulsory for their employees to work from home from some locations. Some firms like Twitter are even heard to be spending on setting up their associate’s home-office.
Well, this is really what the “work-life-balance” lobby of newspaper columnists have waited for all along and now a virus is about to catalyze the process. Now we can stretch out on our balconies or verandahs with the wi-fi router at arms length working and living with and around nature. Our video-conference calls will be an amalgamation of human voices as well as the distant sounds of pots and pans occasionally heard in the background and even sometimes the sight of children screaming and dashing across the back of the screen in contempt of their playground you have now violated.
It’s debatable on whether this move to work permanently from home would work out in the long run. The increase in mental health issues and an uptick in domestic violence has seen a rise in some countries in this very brief period of a lock-down. Nevertheless, all it needs is for one company to trail-blaze the art of working remotely successfully accompanied by an impressive financial quarter and the remaining behemoths would then stampede to the exit.
So, what would then become of the Tech Campus? All those snazzy Laser Printers being sold for throw-away prices at garage sales? What about those uniformed cleaners who had religiously patrolled the floors with disinfectant in hand, the gardeners who toiled under the sun for the upkeep of the landscape, the simple folk who came in from from the hinterland with the hope of benefiting from trickle-down economics.
As vast unemployment stares developing economies in their face, Government stimulus’s at this point of time may serve to be a drain on their exchequer as consumer spending would be mostly restricted to basic essentials. Fresh investment will not return to the markets anytime soon since this downturn is proving to be both cyclic and structural and most of us are anxiously waiting with our surgical masks on for a vaccine to arrive.
Tragedies such as this end up magnifying inequality and widening the digital divide on the whole. Blanket schemes that are meant for the public often take time benefit the needy, if at all it reaches them. This would be a good juncture to revisit the concept of a Universal Basic Income (U.B.I), an idea that has been gathering steam over the last decade. The U.B.I., in short ensures that every citizen receives an amount sufficient to survive without the need to beg on the streets but not to much to splurge on crates of Carlsberg.
You would be surprised to know that some of the leading voices in the digital age are proponents of this. Many developed countries have already toyed with this idea over the last few years due to the unexpected job losses due to technological obsolescence and not any red bristled virus.
For Developing countries with high populations, the cost of implementing anything close to this could be astronomical and in some cases too high even for consideration. Which is why, to make this affordable, the target group for such a scheme needs to be narrowed down to the marginalized folks living Below the Poverty Line (B.P.L) or at the periphery of existence.
But how many people do live beneath the poverty line anyway?
If we consider a smattering of 5 of the poorest countries in Asia consisting of nations such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar, Nepal to Laos, all of them show a declining trend in poverty, although by and large the numbers are still in the millions (see chart below).
Despite the benefits of trickle down economics and urbanization that have accrued over time, the ecosystem is all so fragile, especially for the recipients at the bottom of the pyramid. Sometimes, all it needs is a tiny match to light this powder keg just like the earthquake that hit Nepal in 2015 and a decades work of progress would be swallowed up.
Most governments have rolled out large stimulus packages for the pandemic that target the public in general (see graph below). Apart from a few countries like India and Mexico who have a sizable number under the poverty line, the rest are all G20 members who can afford such large stimulus packages. This is precisely why S.A.A.R.C members recently committed to an emergency fund to handle the CoVid Crisis.
Governments might need to consider using this pandemic as an opportunity to extend these stimulus packages to permanent U.B.I. schemes with certain marginalized groups in mind. A generational crisis like this comes about once in a lifetime and with all hands on deck to ride through the storm, this moment may never come again given how political divisions often thwart tough decisions during peace time.
We have often seen that the poor rarely discriminate among their own in a crisis. So while the cleaner from the Tech campus may lose her job due to a downturn, she may not be classified as a worthy recipient of a Government sponsored U.B.I. scheme, primarily because she was never destitute to begin with.
For a scheme like the U.B.I. to be successful and to check leakage of funds, demographic data needs to be available with the government about its citizens (otherwise a few million hungry mouths will appear from nowhere and line up expecting to be fed). Some countries already have this system robustly in place while others are floundering to put it together. This is clearly the need of the hour.
The Deep State is at our doorsteps .. and as someone rightly said ..
Data is the new oil
