The Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry organized a brainstorming session with Dr. Purnendu Chatterjee, Founder and Chairman, The Chatterjee Group on “Dynamics of Work from Home/ Anywhere- Is it advantageous for Bengal?” on 11th August 2021 on virtual platform. 

Mr C N Raghupathi , Head– India Business , Infosys Ltd ;Mr. Roopen Roy , Founder and CEO ; Sumantrana Management Consultants LLP also graced the session along with  senior dignitaries of The Bengal Chamber- Mr. Deb A Mukherjee, President, The Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Managing Director, Cenergist Energy Private Limited; Mr. Ambarish Dasgupta, Past President, The Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry; Mr. P S Bhattacharyya, Chairperson, Mining and Minerals Committee,The Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Former Chairman, Coal India Limited; Mr. Joydeep Datta Gupta, Partner, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India LLP and Mr. Arnab Basu, Chairperson, IT Committee, The Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Managing Partner, East and Advisory Leader, PricewaterhouseCoopers Pvt. Ltd. 

The Session was commenced with the formal welcome address by Mr. Deb A Mukherjee, President, The Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Managing Director, Cenergist Energy Private Limited. 

Dr. Purnendu Chatterjee, Founder and Chairman, The Chatterjee Group delivered the Keynote Address. Dr. Chatterjee addressed that the pandemic has devastated many lives and has impacted many people. But at the same time, the companies and the employees are recognizing the benefits of this remote working i.e. work from home or work from anywhere. A way has to be thought about how working can be made attractive for people from Bengal, but the objective would be to at least create a direct inflow of about 0.5 trillion dollars and their multiplier effect will get to a trillion dollar on top of the normal growth of the other parts of the economy. Companies like Google are spending millions of dollars on machine learning experts today. If the similar kind of expertise can be made available from anywhere in Bengal, the scope of getting hired in these companies will improve and the employees would enjoy a wonderful quality of life. People are coming to Bengal for vacations; some are taking extensions and working here as well. Professors are willing to teach and conduct their researches in institutes abroad while spending couple of months in cities like Kolkata. Retired executives are also coming to Bengal and taking up posts of directors in multiple companies. Consumption made by this section of people can work as a catalyst by increasing the aggregate demand and creating more job opportunities for people in Bengal. There are 50,000 Bengalis working in the USA alone. They have to be motivated to think about creating jobs in Bengal. This can be done through the NABC and there is a delivery mechanism here in India or Bengal. To get to 0.5 trillion-dollar economy, it would require many entrepreneurs, State Government’s support, enabling infrastructure support, creating great hospitals, educational systems. In the IT sector a way has to be generated to get a fair share, to bring back the people that have left, though all may not be possible but some. Reverse migration would be possible if the quality of jobs available from working in Google or Facebook is also available from Calcutta. Then they also won’t have to deal with racial and other problems that people face when they are working in Texas. The economics for working works both for the employer and the employee. Net savings of the individual would go up even after taking that otherwise the market place would re-adjust. So, it is believed that economics would work out even at reduced costs to the employee but revenue side will improve and many things can be done. The world is looking for talented and work-hungry individuals.

During the Discussions, our eminent Discussants highlighted that new areas need to be looked at where digitalization will help like 3D manufacturing and design thinking. It is to be kept in mind that every industry is not going to be equally conducive to remote working and there will be some tasks that will be done much better remotely than others. So some good organizations should do some mapping of the industries that can be targeted, the kind of tasks that can be portable, etc. Companies are moving up and talking to large number of 10-15 members’ offshore delivery niche booking firms who do not have very large infrastructure. If Bengal can do a survey of all 20-30 or 40-member small IT houses working from their home or offices and can create an outreach programme to Google and Amazon and can show that these are the top 60 small start-ups working from their home in various areas like IOT, Robotics, AI, Machine learning and cognitive science and can create a delivery model showing the correlation among these, then that would possibly open some newer areas of a finer global delivery model. What the global delivery model was will now become even more distributed and the concept of working from home and remote, actually aligned but a little different, will take it down to more granular level. Bengal can get those data centres to try to consolidate these employees who are scattered remotely across all locations. This is what every company wants to get to because the obsession of having 50,000 people to work under their payroll was earlier the marketing pitch that everybody used to engage. This is no more the criteria for all the projects that are being outsourced. Big organizations like PWC and KPMG are doing these outreach programs. 90% of the IT people in Bengal can be considered as employed sitting at their home but they are not employed by Bengal based organizations but organizations located elsewhere. This directly doesn’t impact the state GDP but indirectly impacts it as they are at home and earning money and their consumption in Bengal increases. Therefore, the state GDP and its growth also may possibly increase. If the work from home does not go away even if the pandemic goes off, the Bengal based employees will possibly be having longer period to enjoy and a little bit of permanency can be considered in the improvement of the state GDP because of the consumption they will be having by earning in Bengal. A method of creating a model for infrastructure whereby remote working gets built into the DNA of the thinking and working is to be considered. There is a debate between location-agnostic pay. A work location tool has been created whereby an employee can choose a location of work with a lower pay, because the cost of living is lower in Bengal. It is like a collateral adjustment. So, there is the direct contribution and the other one is the indirect contribution. Investment obviously has to be in network infrastructure as that is the pre-requisite. Investments must be made so that in certain clusters infrastructure and IT infrastructure, connectivity and broadband is as good as in the USA. For the state, investment in education should be the priority, mainly in primary education as Bengal is lagged behind in primary education and also skill development. Today Microsoft certificates may have greater value than University degrees. The employability is not necessarily caused in today’s world by University degrees, it happens more by relevant skills and so these are a couple of areas where the state might look at and step up investments in a big way and it could be done through different models involving the private sector. One of the biggest problems is the federal structure with the State and centre and so, the first thing that the Bengal chamber needs to do is align the federal state policies. Almost every state has a test space except Bengal regarding infrastructure and then there is the artificial intelligence, the principal scientific advisor has his scientific committee where the representatives are present. For improving infrastructure, clusters need to be held - it could be Haldia, it could be Siliguri, it could be Shantiniketan, where quality of life is good, availability of people has to be improved. Four or five such clusters have to be decided upon where the connectivity has to be both cloud available and absolutely top class. The focus should not be on hard infrastructure but on connectivity, cloud and figuring out which industries can do remote working smoothly. An idea has to be generated regarding the kind of impact that is wanted with an actionable plan over a time period of 10 years. An important thing is to bring in the cloud companies in the State, which the State Govt. has done -they have brought AWS in the State. Regarding cyber security, the federal and state has to be aligned. Regarding health care the biggest problem is the money is not to be made in medical services but in education. Unless these things are sorted out it may not be possible to take advantage of the work from home. Companies who normally would not have hired people from Bengal are starting to do so because they can work from home. So, the disruption is minimized and the hassle of changing the location from the Bengal to other states is not there. One can sit and work for hours from home and these are the things that have started happening already and in large numbers for it to be significant. Given this context, it is unlikely that this work from home is going to be reversible. It will be in the new normal and it is going to remain as a hybrid model. This model will not be given up because the moment an employee is transferred from a place like Burdwan to Mumbai, that person would have to pay high rent and it’s just not feasible. However, it is not going to be restricted to IT services and will spread across all other types of industries and works that can be done from anywhere, from any country.