Kuldip Maity

The pandemic has thrown up an economic challenge that has never been experienced in recent history. Shop floors are mostly deserted, jobs are vanishing, unemployment is rising and markets are unstable. There is no easy way out. And more and more people are trying to do something themselves as they struggle to survive.

While India’s core agriculture sector is estimated to have performed at half its capacity, the activities at the margin are barely surviving. The rurban or rural-urban sector,which marks the boundary between the rural and urban, is struggling to survive. In many states, this is the sector to which a major percentage of migrant labour has returned. With the organised economy in a tizzy, hope rests with the small, tiny and micro industries.

And this is where microfinance could be the saviour. The new-unemployed, with little or no capital to invest, need finance to start something that will generate an income for them. Microfinance institutions (MFIs) are seen as the only saviour for these self-employed persons.

Unlike the usual financial institutions, the MFIs are unique in that they have to tend to two bottom lines - financial and social — not just one. MFIs are not charitable organisations: they need to look after their financial bottom line to stay afloat, but they also have to handhold their customers and fulfil their social mandate of tackling poverty.

With this mandate in mind, the regulatory structure for MFIs was drawn up in a manner to enable them to provide credit not based on financial collateral - which by definition their customers lack - but based on social collateral. By making a group accountable for each member’s repayment liability, the MFIs ensure that their default rate is considered next to nothing compared with the banking sector.

As the lockdown is relaxed in phases and the economy tries to return to normal, a large pool of the previously employed will struggle to get gainful employment. It’s here that the MFIs are being seen as crucial. MFIs don’t just provide credit; they also train their customers in the productive use of money. And greater access to microcredit could jump-start the economy by creating gainful employment.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not been kind to us. It has stressed us out in a manner that we couldn’t have anticipated even a few months back before the lockdowns began in end-March. Newspapers, television and social media project this feeling and keep reminding us of the gloom and doom.

The situation is bad. But is it so bad as to make us blind to opportunities created by the very gloom and doom that envelopes us? People on the up and go are constantly reminding us that bad times do not last forever. While COVID-19 will now be part of our life, we also need to remember that so will the flu.

Those who cultivate a positive outlook stand to gain as the recovery begins. With the world at war against the novel coronavirus, the best scientific talent is working to find a vaccine. Never in the history of medicine has so much of resources and talent been harnessed to find one vaccine. Some claim to have already invented a vaccine; some say they will have one by January 2021 and others opt for a more cautious timeline. But a vaccine we will have.

While the novel coronavirus started spreading even before 2020 began, it was only in March that it was declared a pandemic and nations began imposing lockdowns. It is August now, and the talk of a vaccine is now stronger than the feeling that civilisation is under threat.

Over the last four months, schools have begun teaching their students remotely, business meetings are being held on virtual conference platforms and, as I have already talked about in my previous blog, work from home has become part of our life.

Life always bounces back with new promise. We have found ways to fight many of the challenges to our lifestyle. We are now talking about a vaccine, higher rate of recovery and lower death rate, and, of course, the green shoots that are being seen in the economy.

The question that we should ask ourselves is: what have we done with our lives during these days? What have we learnt, and how have we coped? Let us create affirmative answers by being positive. That’s the only way to go. Stay safe and stay positive. Being negative makes you blind to opportunity.

An article in a consumer behaviour research journal has described smartphones as an “adult pacifier”. The term is catching up very fast. However, the issue goes one step further during the pandemic. With a very big percentage of the working population working from home, the line between the personal and the professional life is getting blurred.

This has put the traditional understanding of the professional and personal into direct conflict. Questions are being raised, rejoinders are being written and the space of debate on this has begun to open up.

In 2018, a Virginia Tech professor, William Becker, in a study on working in the electronic age found that the need to keep oneself updated on one’s emails has a significant cost. It takes a toll on one’s mental wellbeing. His study found that the concept of ‘flexible work boundaries’ actually turn into ‘work without boundaries’.

But this study was done at a time much before the pandemic. And now with the work from home being the new normal, the question, therefore, is how to cope with the new situation while respecting the private space in the ‘virtual workspace’. For the virtual space is now not an option but a compulsion.

This is the question that is now haunting the HR professionals and the search is now on for new ethics in employer expectation.

All of us have seen various photos of parents working from home with kids hanging around, cartoons showing workers attending VCs and online meetings with a formal shirt but a pair of shorts (which cannot be seen on screen)! The question that haunts the HR professionals is how best to resolve these conflicts. If a parent is working from home, it’s but natural that the kid will seek parental help while doing homework! Will the parent take a break and help the child?

Creation of flexible work boundaries without making it a 24X7 flow is the challenge in the new normal. The fact that this can be done is unquestionable. Different organisations are at it, working from their perspectives. A consensus is bound to emerge as the corporate standard. Question is when and not if.

When it started there was a feeling that we wouldn’t be bound to our homes for very long. But we put up a brave face as the lockdowns continued. It was cooking time, sharing-of-hobbies time and learning-new-things time for some.

Now it has been four months and counting. And these four months have changed our lifestyle in a way that we couldn’t have thought possible. Except for those in production units, others were forced to embrace new ways of conducting professional engagements, wherever their line of work permitted them to do so. Even in early March, before the lockdown, who could have thought of a new sales pitch happening without physically sitting across the table with a client? And accounts getting settled without a closed-door physical meeting?

Notice how I am putting ‘physical’ in italics! Or writing ‘meeting’ with physical as its adjective. Four months back, a meeting by default would have meant physical as opposed to virtual. And if we needed a virtual meeting, only then would we have described the meeting as virtual.

Even the addas are happening online! Who would have thought that a bunch of ageing school friends, living in the same city, would get together on a virtual platform to chat or share jokes? Something that was once quite unacceptable despite all the tools being there is now an accepted as normal.

Yes, life has changed in the last few months and it has also changed the way we conduct business. We are now afraid of physical closeness let alone contact or crowds. And we are finding online meetings much easier to deal with than physical ones.

The lockdowns have made “WFH” or work-from-home an everyday phrase. I haven’t come across any authentic productivity survey related to this yet, but some evidence suggests that WFH is working fine. Even employers have found new advantages in allowing their people to work from home.

But is too early to jump to conclusions. Changing social behaviour across the board is not very easy. And we should remember that professional behaviour is but a part of our societal character. But there are a few points that have been noted by everybody across the spectrum. It is possible to work without being ‘there’. And work from home may not necessarily reduce the productivity of an employee. In the coming days, we will see a lot of changes in the functioning of a business, but the extent of change will take time to crystallise.