Subir Roy
Bangalore

MELWIN D’Costa, 35, and Narayanaswamy, 27, work for MphasiS, an information technology and business process outsourcing company started 10 years ago in Bangalore. They have put in 18 and 15 months respectively. Both are as cheerful and articulate as bright young people in this most modern of Indian industries invariably are. But what sets them apart is that they have disabilities.

D’Costa is tall and moves around in crutches. He was hale and hearty till he was 18 when a viral attack affected his spinal cord and left his lower limbs paralysed. He studied in a polytechnic for the physically disabled where he got a diploma in computer science and thereafter taught the same discipline before joining MphasiS. Narayanaswamy has to move in a wheelchair, having been afflicted by polio when he was two years old. He is an M Com. from Bangalore University.

Both work in the back office operations of the London office of a Zurich headquartered insurance company. Via email they get data in the nature of proposals and quotations for insurance cover from prospective customers. They enter and process the data according to parameters laid down and then issue the documents, that is, the insurance policies.

The two are able to work for MphasiS because they went through a three-month special training programme designed to fill the gap between what is required of a white collar worker in an office and what a differently abled person can offer initially. The training, usually for those with school leaving expertise, is imparted by a two-year- old Bangalore based NGO - Diversity and Equal Opportunity Centre, (DEOC). Its prime mover is Rama Chari who has nearly two decades of experience in working with the disabled.

The training takes place at the premises provided by another NGO, the Association of People with Disability. It also has links with the vocational rehabilitation centre of the Karnataka government which registers and trains the disabled.

DEOC has put together a curriculum in English which seeks to equip the differently abled with analytical and computer skills and helps them with personality development. This training curriculum has been so successful that DEOC has now started a sort of training the trainer programme whereby the curriculum is passed on to other NGOs who can then initiate their own training programmes.

MphasiS is among the most successful in being an equal opportunity employer which has a programme to induct people with disabilities among its staff. It has 300 such employees who make up one percent of the 30,000 employees spread across India. This ratio is high by Indian business standards though there is a lot to do - there are around 70 million disabled in India who make up over six per cent of its current population.

Much of the initiative for this comes from Meenu Bhambhani, the organisation's manager of community initiative (she heads its corporate social responsibility operations). An alumnus of the University of Illinois at Chicago, she has held various positions in government, been a consultant with the World Bank and is a substantial contributor to the literature on the disabled in India.

Bhambhani points out that becoming an equal opportunity employer has been a great learning process for MphasiS. Along with developing a commitment, it has gone about interacting with NGO partners in a systematic corporate manner. NGOs have been informed that they will be judged on certain criteria like how inclusive they are, how many disabled are benefited, how they are addressing the gender bias. The training which has made it possible for D’Costa and Narayanaswamy to work for MphasiS is a joint initiative between the firm and DEOC.

The extent of the learning process for the firm is outlined by Elango R, chief human resources officer of MphasiS. He explains that this is not about charity as the exercise offers a business plus for the company - it opens up a channel of hiring for an industry which is short on skills. Besides, employee satisfaction and productivity is about the highest among the disabled. Attrition among disabled employees (for an industry which is plagued by it) is nominal as loyalty and gratitude are high. If you take care of their career opportunities, they stay.

Not all the initiative by a person like Bhambhani, herself an orthopedic disabled, can succeed without a management buy-in which then results in corporate policies that enable the necessary investments and initiation of systems that allow the programme to deliver. The disabled initially come in with lower productivity and take longer to fit in. "Hence we have created a separate cost centre so that costs (related to inducting in the disabled) become a part of corporate costs. Managers who are able to use disabled staff get utilisation credit and relaxation at the business level because a disabled person may not be immediately billable," says Elango.

Then he candidly admits, "We did not know how to treat the disabled. Meenu taught us. After she came into the organisation we did a lot of sensitisation of our managers. Initially I was worried that she would be an activist. But now I can say we wouldn't have got here without her." Emphasising that it is all part of hard core business, Ilango recalls that until Bhambhani physically came in (she had been located by a search firm as the company needed a replacement of its outgoing head of CSR) he was not aware that she herself was disabled.

This is Ilango's second stint with MphasiS and he points out that there is also something in the organisations DNA, right from its beginning, which has made it keep experimenting, looking for new ways of doing things and a disregard for holy cows. He traces this cultural aspect of the organisation to its founder Jerry Rao who has now exited and is continuing with his habit of doing new things by promoting low cost housing, even while buying into the booming wine business in India.

How much of an exception is MphasiS? Xerxes Desai, former managing director of Titan, the watch and jewellery maker, who is adviser to CII's Karnataka disability networking forum, recalls that right from when Titan began 22 years ago, it took a strong interest in employing the disabled. It then achieved the same kind of disabled to total work force ratio that MphasiS now has.

In recent years he has been going over how industry can be persuaded to do more and a unique outcome is the recent bulky CII study, ‘A
Values Route to Business Success: The why and how of employing persons with disability.’

The whole idea was to set out how to do the job, what to do and where is the literature that can guide you. The cardinal point that comes through in the book, which is really a manual and a guide with case studies, is don't identify jobs for people with disabilities, open up regular jobs for them so that they can perform them as well or better than the others.

On the pluses of providing an opportunity to the disabled to work alongside others with equal productivity and dignity, he mentions the case of a young girl who is a star student, good in both sports and academics of the school that Titan runs in Hosur where it has its main factory. Her father is a Titan employee with disability!

The book sets a fairly tough agenda which can be intimidating. So Desai's advice to businesses is that there is no need to get it all right at the beginning, you can go step by step.

On the crucial question as to how far Indian business has progressed in this regard, what Desai has to say is both revealing and disappointing. In the last 20 years, there has been very little movement in industry towards creating work opportunities for the disabled. There has been some action in public sector units and government agencies, though the latter has often ended up with tokenism. He adds that industry figures (of disabled in employment) are miserable, though there are individual small firms that do a lot.

But something is happening. MNCs are making a difference and now seem to be taking the leadership. He attributes this not so much to corporate trends as the fact that in their societies doing these things is socially mandatory. Some of this seems to have rubbed off on Indian companies with international exposure, making them quite active in this regard.

Perhaps more than all this, there has been an explosion of activity in the NGO sector. The CII study is written by leaders of individual NGOs, many of whom are disabled themselves, whose credentials are obvious. They have brought to the task both professional rigour and passion.

My whole experience of researching this story has an amusing sidelight involving these NGO leaders. When Bhambhani and Chari were briefing me about MphasiS, I airily asked them if they had seen a recent CII study on how business can employ those with disabilities, a copy of which Xerxes Desai had sent me. They looked at each other and told me they, the two of them, had written parts of it! I had obviously not yet opened the book and leafed through it, or I would have found this out. I felt both chastened and very reassured.

July 2009 Edition

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