Opinion Crossed wires

For a study funded by the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Fulbright Program,Mankekar and Gupta have spent the best part of this year uncovering and understanding the lives of back office workers.

Call centres have become the symbol of India’s relationship with the globalising world. Their workers are participants in the larger story of India’s rise,and in the new energy of its recent economic status. But the rapid cultural changes wrought by these economic shifts as seen through the lives of call centre workers,have got very little attention.

The stereotypes from the industry’s early days are very hard to shake off but the current reality is different,say researchers Mankekar and Gupta. The past years have changed the kind of workers that seek call centre employment. Lower middle-class men and women from cities and smaller urban towns form the bulk of the worker pool today.

Bangalore’s call centres have grown rapidly in the past years. Their employees,mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings operating in American,British and Australian time-zones form the bulk of India’s million-plus industry pool.

To understand the workers’ lives and their interconnectedness with the world,the researchers surveyed and interviewed workers in three different call centres working with overseas customers. Their socio-economic backgrounds varied widely,as also the money they earned.

Contrary to the fun-loving,high-living image,many of the young workers shouldered the heavy burden of supporting their families or aged parents. Call centre agents who came from smaller towns to Bangalore for work usually sent home money. “Agents worked long hours and saved money to send back to families,” says Mankekar,a professor of women’s studies at UCLA.

Gupta and Mankekar found many employees slept a couple of hours a day. They worked very hard at their jobs at night and attended college in the day trying to build a life for themselves.

But stereotypes,a legacy from the early days,still flourished in society. “I found many women,very young women,supporting entire families in the face of societal suspicion and criticism of the kind of work they were doing. When would these women go to pubs and bars?” asked Mankekar.

Labels still dictated how society and neighbours viewed call centre workers. Many parents were happy with the money their sons and daughters brought home but were deeply ambivalent about the work. “Even for very supportive parents,having their daughters go out to work at night — the very negative symbolism of it — was very distressing,” Mankekar said.

At another level,call centres have granted very dramatic social mobility to a section of young Indians,say the anthropologists. “The daughter of a bus conductor or the son of a plumber has made social mobility possible for their entire families because of his or her one job,” says Gupta. These workers’ status is dramatically different than that of their parents.

“It was not possible a few generations ago for poor families to overnight become middle-class families. Call centres have provided this opening,” describes Gupta. Anyone can be a call centre worker without requiring specialised education. Further,these workers can rise from agent to manager level,a kind of factory floor-to-executive cabin climb that was unimaginable a generation ago.

India’s call centres have been at the centre of the debate on the virtues and problems of globalisation. Because of the massive changes wrought on young lives and public culture,they will continue to be exciting sites for sociologists and anthropologists to study transformational changes.

saritha.rai@expressindia.com