Every day at 4 am, Aisha Begum wakes up to take a one-hour bus ride from her home in Sandur village, roughly 400 km from Bangalore, to Toranagallu in Karnataka?s iron ore and manganese belt of Bellary. On arrival, men and women in yellow and blue helmets, tiffin carriers in hand, rush towards JSW Group?s mammoth steel plant; Aisha enters a fancy township, instead.
JSW?s township of Vidyanagar is no less than a resort with bungalows, hills, landscaped lawns with blooming spring flowers, art installations, an artificial lake, cobbled pathways, a sports club and a spa. In the middle of all this is a building housing a cooperative society and a bank. At 6 every morning, Aisha walks up to the first floor of the bank building and enters a large room called Datahalli. In a few minutes, the air is filled with the sound of 100-odd women typing on their computers, entering data, coding, scanning and indexing. Aisha delegates the work, oversees operations and provides technical support.
Datahalli, which means ?a village of data?, is JSW?s five-year-old rural BPO. It does ?sub-sourced? work ? part of the low-end processes outsourced by international clients to a domestic firm that is further subcontracted to rural BPO units. This helps Indian firms remain cost competitive since wages in rural areas are much lower compared with cities.
Datahalli?s posh surroundings mask its motive. Employing only women, hired from 21 villages and three towns around the steel plant, it plays a key role in empowering them, their families and their community.
Aisha, now 23, can say no to marriage for now ? unheard of in her village thus far. ?Most of the girls working here have become choosy about picking their husbands,? says Shaila Lobo, who is in charge of Datahalli. ?Working in the BPO has helped women pick better grooms in local entrepreneurs like shop and taxi owners compared to the labour class they would normally get married to.?
The average age of marriage for women in the area has gone up ? from about 14 a few years back to 21 now. But it?s not just about marriage. For Padmawati, 24, working in the BPO has helped her forget a deformity ?she has polio. Jaylakshmi joined Datahalli after her husband, a medical representative, died. She now supports two college-going sons and her father-in-law. Inspired by her, family members are slowly allowing their daughters to go in for higher studies. Bharti, the 22-year-old daughter of vegetable vendors, is ambitious. Educated up to class 12, she does data entry but wants a better career in something to do with computers.
The BPO, says Lobo, has been partly successful in spreading the message of the girl child, family wellbeing, health, hygiene and how to handle money. Many of its employees manage bank accounts for their families. At the entry level, Datahalli employees earn a basic remuneration of R3,000; there are different slabs depending on experience. An operations in-charge can earn up to R18,000. Besides the basic salary, there is PF, an insurance cover and conveyance allowance.
Most of the employees have either a class 10 or 12 certificate from a local school and are trained for between 45 days and 2 months to be job-ready. ?There are no typing or computer education institutes around this place. So we have to start right from scratch,? Lobo says. Typing classes are followed up by a course in English and a soft skills training programme.
The managers of the BPO are tightlipped about how much revenue it earns. JSW, however, is not treating the BPO as a commercial venture; it is a way to put more discretionary income in the hands of the people surrounding its plants. In the last five years, it has certainly achieved that, and much more. Aisha says she wouldn?t get married to a family that doesn?t let her work. Bharti quips that she can now fund her own education.