Ready for the workplace

We have the confidence; we have no problem understanding what our project manager tells us,” 21-year-old Syed Ali says, gesticulating briskly. His work at the Chennai office of business process outsourcing company Firstsource involves data entry and processing insurance claims. Seated beside him are Kumaran, Balaji and Kaviarasan, who giggle shyly during the interview.

All of them want to become team leaders some day. Some of them have hearing and speech difficulties, and converse through a sign language interpreter.

“They are not any different from other people in our office. They have the same issues, fears and concerns around their job, growth prospects, learning, issues with supervisor, etc,” says Vedagiri Vijayakumar, Vice-President – Operations.

The company has about 50 employees with speech, hearing or orthopaedic challenges across India, and 13 are at its Chennai, Tiruchi, Puducherry and Vijayawada offices.

Employing people with disability is not about corporate social responsibility, or CSR, emphasises Vijayakumar. “Our strategy has a business purpose. This is a talent pool that has been neglected for long and we don’t want to exclude them from our workforce. We are a growing company, we need to lay our hands on every bit of talent we can. We don’t look at stereotypes.”

Does this hiring strategy, which is about a year old at the company, involve changes in training methods? “We have included sign language interpreters in training associates. We are also training our team leaders in basic sign language. All this entails 2-3 days extra. Nothing that impacts our business,” he says.

For the first three months of this exercise, Vijayakumar consciously looked into the performance of the new hires. “My initial fear was whether we had done enough to help them do their jobs. Now I have stopped looking at it. Their ability to grasp is as good as anyone else’s. We pay for performance. Their performance is no different from others.”

People with disability constitute about 2 per cent of the population, according to government figures, but NGOs put the number at 7-10 per cent. “There hasn’t been an official census for people with disability; there isn’t even a common agreement on what constitutes a disability. Assuming the higher number, are businesses representative of this society? The answer is ‘no’,” says Vijayakumar.

Are corporations doing enough to make a difference? “They have started to, but a lot more needs to be done,” he says. “Firstsource has 21,000 employees in India. We have achieved a very small level of penetration through this initiative. Even companies that started many years before us have just 1-1.5 per cent of employees with disability.”

Among the challenges is the absence of graduates who can be absorbed into the companies, he says.

Do you find 7 per cent of children in schools with disability, he asks. “Right at that level, it is not representative. Even in the very few schools that accept such children, the dropout rate is high due to lack of infrastructure or trained teachers.

“We talk about wheelchair access etc, but there is not even fundamental access to education that provides people with disability access to jobs. Is the right to education equally applicable for people with disability? We need to address these issues as a society.”

Citing the example of the US, he says laws made 20-30 years ago have gone a long way in making that country disabled-friendly. “Today you go to a Walmart or any other place abroad, there is infrastructure in place.” India too has building codes mandating disabled-friendly infrastructure, but lack of awareness is a major problem, he contends. Firstsource offices have wheelchair access, ramps and disabled-friendly restrooms.

To help it hire more people with disabilities, the company has tied up with NGOs such as Vishesh and Dr Reddy’s Laboratories Foundation besides launching special recruitment drives and targeted advertising.

It also aims to initiate a forum to facilitate discussions on the grievances and concerns of employees with disability.

The Office of Disability would be set up to evolve policies and best practices focusing on leveraging this special talent pool and addressing its needs, he says.

“We cannot give a broad solution as each individual is different with unique disabilities. The policies will be framed as the need arises: Like loans for motorised vehicles for the orthopaedically challenged,” adds Vijayakumar. “Banks have a mandate to provide soft loans to people with disability, according to RBI rules. As some of our customers are banks, we could work with our clients to help them fulfil their mandate by facilitating loans.”

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