Authored Articles

Trying to play the soothsayer of the tribe is a dirty job, but someone has to do it. Drawing insights from several research reports and from my own role as a practitioner have pushed me to conclude that the top priorities for any staffing company at the moment are:

Increasing profitability.

Driving top-line revenue growth.

Improving candidate sourcing.

Their operational strategies should be focussed on:

Improving the management of client relationships.

Expanding into new markets.

Niyat is a beautiful Urdu word — it roughly translates to your mind’s intentions. But that delicate language has an even more beautiful word called, zehniyat; roughly, your heart and soul’s intentions. One of life’s most interesting questions is whether we should judge people by outcomes or their niyat or zehniyat. Surely we shouldn’t forgive a government spending thousands of crores on education without our children learning, whatever the niyat.

While India has tried its hand at distance education models like massive open online courses (MOOCs), they haven't really worked out well enough.

Amid a host of factors like distance, lack of accessibility, lack of engagement, lack of motivation and so on, dropout rates for correspondence courses still remain high.

However, ed-tech start-up SchoolGuru has been trying to find a solution.

Here's how.

I find myself often in a rather unenviable position to predict the future of jobs. In spite of my valiant Nostradamus attempts, I have concluded that predictions are good for TRPs but are potentially misguiding for our youth. India’s job market has witnessed many unpleasant incidents in the past twelve months — while as a nation, through various noisy debates, we kept reacting to the symptoms but did not try to get to the root of the issue.

A few years ago, when ‘digital’ entered the corporate lexicon and boardroom discussions, few knew or anticipated the far-reaching impact that it would create. Today, for organisations, it is no longer about preparing for digital or making a transition to a new of way of thinking and doing business and work.

Some of us have long felt that India’s poverty industry and poor people lived on different planets. But the poverty industry’s reaction to new data from Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO)/Employees’ State Insurance (ESI)/National Pension System (NPS) confirms they don’t live on different planets but a different gamma quadrant. Job seekers —mostly young and poor —know that a formal job is better than an informal job (higher wages) and an informal job is better than no job (wages higher than zero).

April and May are taxing times for both employers and employees alike.  While most companies follow April to March as their performance review cycle, which sees an extensive organization-wide performance review process; for the employees, in addition to the anticipation and anxiety of the performance review process, it is also time for annual tax planning and investment declaration for all employees falling in tax bracket.  

Ginnie Romety, the CEO of IBM, once spiked a thought, “Man and Machine always get a better answer than Man alone or Machine alone”. The recent announcement of the new integrated scheme for school education is a right step in the right direction but technology alone can hardly solve the fundamental problem affecting our education.

The changes happening in the last 10 years are significantly more than what happened in the last few centuries and our school education is woefully inadequately prepared to educate our youth to manage the change.

In the 1920s, Russian economist Alexander Chayanov made the case to Pandit Nehru that small farms were viable because of self-exploitation; you don’t have to pay yourself, your wife or your kids a salary. This argument is as dyfunctional and nonsensical today for small farms as it was almost 100 years ago but it also applies to India’s 50% self-employment.

Each time a woman stands up for herself , without knowing it possibly, without claiming it she stands up for all women.