PWD: HR's Lost Pool

Every hard look at the road ahead for India's tech and BPO

industries returns a scary HR picture-of the Gap. We'll get the business,

but where are the people?

An old friend, scientist Sugata Mitra, uses speech-to-text

software that color-tags a candidate on speaking ability. Green is good,

employable. Yellow is trainable. Red is not OK. The BPO companies, he says,

scramble for the 'green guys', run out of them, then hunt for the yellow

ones. (And no one's really working on shifting the red majority into the

yellow band.)

Industry persons go further. They ran out of the 'green

guys'. They're running out of the yellow ones.

But there's another invisible group spanning these bands.

Over 70 mn people with disabilities, PWDs. Often employable or trainable but for

their disability, they're rarely appropriately employed.

Many companies have inclusion and diversity policies. But a

program to recruit a PWD starts out a CSR activity, is passed on to HR, then on

to the SBU: where the manager sees a liability. And most workplaces don't have

access facilities: ramps, washrooms, Braille, software.

There's some change. With a few figuring out that it isn't

CSR, but good HR and good sense. Hotel chain Welcomgroup, which started with

blind pianists and moved on to PWD recruits in areas including reservations and

data entry, finds them better employees: more stable, dedicated-and



productive. Anubhuti, a small Delhi-based HR consultancy that has placed over 80
PWDs in companies such as IBM Daksh, Hewitt, GE Money, Efunds, and others, cites

similar response from them.

There are deaf data entry operators, wheelchair bound call

center CSAs, blind HR executives and voice/soft-skills trainers. A Bangalore-based

domestic call center employs blind CSAs. A few software companies have blind

programmers, who work with software like Jaws. (Arun Mehta, who has worked in

this area along with the National Association for the Blind, describes as

revolutionary other open source, Linux-based access tools, from Gnopernicus, to

emacspeak-which "creates a true audio desktop".)

It isn't, then, about CSR, or PWDs, though those are

starting points for many. It's about a talent pool that may be lying untapped,

while the world is hunting for people.

What will it take to tap this pool? CSR, HR policy, access

facilities...they help, but aren't the key. The challenge is in the mind of

the manager who says "good idea, but for some other SBU". The key is

in getting the CEO convinced, interested and driving this.

The US and Europe are far better off on access and inclusion.

If India aspires to globalization, this is one rung of the ladder, which

straddles a big gap.

In the year ahead we'll watch this area. Do you have a success-or other-story,

with PWD recruits? Write to me.

Prasanto K Roy



pkr@cybermedia.co.in