From Silicon Valley To Salt Lake

Artificial intelligence tech firm iMerit spurs a mini-revolution in small-town India.

To understand why Zartaj Nazneen’s life trajectory so far has been practically the opposite of what is preordained, expected or likely, readers need to take a step back in time.

Almost a decade ago in 2012-13, when Zartaj passed out of her all-girls Urdu medium government school in Metiabruz, also known as Kolkata’s mini Lucknow, hardly any girls were taking the path she did. Like a majority of girls in her community, Zartaj married early, even before her graduation and post her marriage she began to teach in a school nearby as she personally loved teaching.

She however soon realised that her teaching income would take her nowhere and decided to enrol for a course conducted by the Anudip Foundation, which opened up the world of technology, artificial intelligence and a whole host of subjects that very few around her including her family members could comprehend or grasp.

After clearing the course, Zartaj joined iMerit, initially as a fresher and now after over seven years in her late 20s, she is leading a team of over 30 as one of the over 1100 domain analysts in the company, earning many multiples of what she was as a teacher. Living in a joint family, Zartaj commutes to the centre and works daily, aware and content that her young son is well looked after even when she’s at work.

Although her mother, mother-in-law and only sister are housewives, Zartaj with the full support of her husband and in-laws, has broken the mould that girls in her community typically follow and is charting her own unique path. Not only does she value and enjoy her financial independence, but she has also become a sort of role model in her community (more on this later in the story).

Not far from Zartaj, Barnali Paik’s life in Karanjali, around 70 kilometres from Kolkata was also proceeding on the usual trajectory with very little hope of any dramatic twists or turns. Like other girls around her, Barnali finished her schooling at a local government school, did her graduation with Bengali Honours from Kolkata University and was expected to be nothing other than a homemaker.

It was after she finished her graduation that a friend suggested that Barnali join the Anudip Foundation for a course in basic computers and spoken English. After finishing her course - in which she performed well - she found she had four job offers, of which she picked iMerit, which was in the inception stage at the time, becoming a member of the start-up team at the time.

In a single shot, Barnali broke many glass ceilings for girls from her village and community: she moved to Kolkata from her village to embark on a career (she says girls move mostly if they marry outside) - something she never envisaged while growing up and she entered the world of technology, an alien field for any girls and mostly even boys in her village. Barnali met her life partner at work, is married, has a child and is now in her mid-30s is one of the firm’s 196 domain experts and specialists, leading a team of 300 staffers, something she never imagined possible.

While women like Barnali and Zartaj from smaller towns and cities are increasingly making an entry into India’s workforce, what makes the two of them stand apart even more than others is the kind of work they do out of their centres in Baruipur and Metiabruz respectively, which a majority of women or even men from their milieu are not able to even fully comprehend.

Both girls are working with artificial intelligence models for autonomous vehicles, highly specialised and technical work for clients based out of Silicon Valley and other cities in the United States, work that very few outside of India’s metros are exposed to, let alone women. In general, many of Barnali and Zartaj’s colleagues work on projects that sound like Greek to those around them: autonomous mobility, medical artificial intelligence, precision agriculture, geospatial and drones and the latest area of generative AI!

What is heartening is that Barnali and Zartaj are not isolated instances. Close to 4000 employees working for iMerit - a majority of them women - come from remote locations in the country but are now working at the company in the space of artificial intelligence and doing other high-end tech work for clients in the Silicon Valley and the United States, based out of nine centres across India. At the company’s Shillong centre, employees come from Mawlai, Upper Meghalaya, Laban, Laitumkhrah, Madanryting and Rynjah, mostly unheard-of locations. Similarly, the Ranchi centre has staffers who have relocated from Tatisilwai, Ormanjhi, Daltungunj, Bokaro, Burdwan and Medinipur.

In 2012-13, the US-based founders of the social impact company decided to set up the company with the express objective of setting up an inclusive workforce and ensuring that the ripple effects of the tech revolution that gripped and structurally altered India in the late 1980s and 1990s is not restricted only to India’s metros and cities like Bengaluru. But to understand how we got here, this story needs to rewind a little.

Radha's Journey

Back in the 1960s when Radha Basu stood first in her engineering entrance exam, she hid the newspaper to first prepare her parents, which carried a small photo of her announcing this, as she had taken the entrance without her parent’s consent and knowledge. While her father was progressive, believed in the value of education and was even pleased one of his three girls was showing an interest in the sciences, he was comfortable with her doing a BSc in math or physics but engineering studies back then to his mind was primarily a male preserve. He felt she was setting herself up for failure as engineering required a mental makeup and physical energy that she didn’t possess, that the professors would not support her and that this might affect her marriage prospects too (conventional families would be unwilling to marry their sons to girls who were engineers!).

Coming from her all-girls Convent school run by Irish nuns, a 16-year-old determined youngster, Radha with her inherent love for all things tech nonetheless joined the oldest engineering college in the city, one of few girls in a college with over 2500 boys, to do her electrical engineering and communications. It might not have been the conventional thing to do but it was the only thing that excited her: using technology to solve problems.

It was after she finished her engineering and landed up in the United States with her US $8 allowance (the maximum foreign exchange amount permissible by Indian authorities at the time) that Radha learnt many life lessons that proved seminal to her personal and professional development. “I learnt to be entrepreneurial, how to stretch limited resources to the maximum to survive and how to improvise and innovate”, says she, all of which stood her in good stead as she carved out her own niche at Hewlett Packard.

Eventually, she returned for a stint in India and set up HP’s India office in Bengaluru in the mid-1980s, one of the earliest tech firms in India’s Silicon Valley at a time when Infosys, TCS, Wipro and Texas Instruments were yet to become the giants they did. After spending twenty years with HP, Radha also became the first woman of Indian origin to list a tech company she founded Support Soft - on Nasdaq.

But all through her innumerable visits in and out of India and her IT career which took her places and exposed her to some of the biggest and most influential names in the global tech arena, one thing rankled Radha and her husband Dipak Basu who’d been with Cisco and had also been involved with India’s IT revolution through his career.

India’s tech revolution, while something the country could and should take pride in, was not inclusive and diverse enough: too few women were engaged in it and its trickle-down effects were limited to the country’s bigger cities and towns, mainly the metro cities. Small-town India, marginalised communities and women were missing in the action. It bothered her that this was so. “In the early 2000s, nobody in India believed that small-town India would be able to contribute meaningfully to India’s IT revolution - a bit like nobody in the US in the 1980s thought India would be able to contribute meaningfully to the global tech revolution”, says Radha.

This troubled her and her husband who began thinking more deeply about it. Why couldn’t more Indian women like herself participate and benefit more from a revolution that was shaping and defining so much of the nation’s upward trajectory? Indians with their aptitude for math and the sciences were spread all over the country and not limited to Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Gurgaon and Chennai. There was no reason why equally advanced tech work could not be accomplished by youngsters educated in Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns and cities. Only some basic skill training would be required to make it happen.

The How, Why, Where, What And When Of iMerit

In 2007, post a detailed study on the lives of the marginalised communities in the Ganges Delta region south of Kolkata, a group of social entrepreneurs including Radha and her husband set up the Anudip Foundation to try and create livelihood opportunities for the people of rural India through information technology.

Anudip creates digital livelihoods for underserved communities through technology and skills while also providing courses in spoken English, workplace readiness skills and so on to help men and women find technology-driven employability. Typically, the beneficiaries are from high-need, marginalised communities, religious minorities, tribals, political refugees, or victims of trafficking.

The foundation has since its inception worked with over 4.5 lakh individuals by providing technology-driven employability and entrepreneurship for crisis-stricken youth and women with centres at various locations in the Sundarbans region of eastern India providing faculty, training equipment, student mobilisation, training, and placement services helping them to earn sustainable wages, multiplying their family incomes and reap the long-term benefits of working in a structured environment. Another foundation in Hubli, set up by two stalwarts of the US tech industry - Jaishree and Desh Deshpande - partnered with iMerit to set up its Hubli centre focused on artificial intelligence in healthcare and autonomous mobility.

In 2012, Radha decided on an experiment where she got some high-end projects through her network in Silicon Valley and across the US and decided to see if the work could be done or outsourced to a group trained through Anudip. That’s when the Eureka moment occurred. Radha and her team found that young women in Metiabruz who were used to working on very intricate embroidery were able to do highly accurate work - up to one pixel - with projects involving computer vision. Moreover, the youngsters delivered with a sincerity and hunger that was hard to match. “Their attention to detail and accuracy was far higher than anticipated and we knew we had a winner here”, says Radha.

That’s when she decided to bite the bullet and set up iMerit with a few goals in mind.

One, she would leverage her network in the US tech sector and secure high-level digital skills-based projects and assignments that could create mass employment through rural IT (merit) across India by hiring a majority of its employees from remote locations and bringing the benefits from India’s IT revolution to them. Also, it would work to reduce the gender gap she saw no matter where she looked by ensuring that a majority of its employees were women including those who wanted to pursue their careers even after motherhood. And three, it would be a for-profit social enterprise - as opposed to an NGO - so it could be scaled up over time. Coincidentally, around this time she happened to meet Omidyar Network chief Pierre Omidyar, who decided to seed invest in her idea and went a step further to argue that at some stage, digital will evolve into artificial intelligence and iMerit would define the future of tech work, based out of little known parts of India.

In 2012-13, iMerit was registered with its headquarters in Kolkata and there’s been no looking back since. The company now has over 3800 employees with an average age of just over 24, working across nine centres (Salt Lake, Metiabruz, Bhubaneswar, Baruipur, Ranchi, Vizag, Shillong, Hubli and Bengaluru). 75 per cent of the firm’s staff comes from non-metro towns and cities in India with equal gender balance. In addition, it has over 950 currently under training at its academy. A decade after it was formed, 73 per cent of the staffers are people trained and placed in these jobs as opposed to existing industry hires and over half of the managers and those who lead delivery are from this cohort. So, iMerit has been able to add to the pool of qualified professionals for the industry, rather than poaching from rivals.

“If getting the trickle-down benefits of India’s IT revolution to move into India’s smaller towns and cities is one pillar, reducing the gender gap and building an inclusive workforce has been the other”, explains Radha. The company with a CAGR of 35 per cent has been profitable for the last five years and has over the years raised around US $ 25 million through investors including Indian American businessman and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Omidyar Network India, British International Investment and Dell.

From the word go, the idea was to steer clear of the fundraising game that so-called unicorns fell prey to. “Our focus from the beginning has been to run the company profitably and sustainably, not continuously raising capital to fund losses”, argues Radha. She says at any point the company has stuck to the discipline of growing on the strength of its internal resources and funds in the bank with two feet firmly on the ground: one foot maniacally focussed on delivering the best possible solutions using artificial intelligence and the other on the most inclusive workforce based out of India. A low attrition rate of less than 10 per cent in an industry that has been witnessing 30 per cent and above globally has helped retain and pull in more clients as the US clients value continuity. “They have the comfort of knowing they're in capable and familiar hands”, points out Radha, saying the low attrition has been a big differentiator for iMerit in securing projects.

Experts and observers in the tech sector who are aware of what the company has built in the last decade or so say that its main strengths and weaknesses both lie in the forces behind it. A very high-powered set of board members and investors implies that the business remains excessively dependent on the network and continued and long-term commitment of these individuals. Moreover, technology is an industry based on ever-shifting sands. Shilpa Kumar, partner, of Omidyar Network India (ONI), an investor in the company and an alumni of IIM Kolkata points out that tech start-ups like this have to always be on their toes to “keep the business model dynamic”. “Cheaper, faster, better and staying ahead of the curve with technology is critical in startups like this”, she argues, saying that a recent buy of a Turkish AI-assisted data annotation platform is a step in this direction.

Mini Revolution In Metiabruz: Changing Dynamics

Women have over the last decade become the cornerstones or pillars on which the edifice of the firm stands in the region. Almost from the beginning, women including several return-to-work mothers formed the core of the business with an equal ratio of women and men, a rarity among tech firms globally.

Over a period of time, girls like Barnali who were part of the initial cohort have risen through the ranks and are now domain experts (out of 196, 70 are women). These women earn salary packages comparable with the industry standards in cities like Bengaluru and Gurgaon and this is fundamentally altering the way many parents and the wider ecosystem around them view the future of their daughters and daughter-in-laws. In many cases, not only are the girls earning, they are the main breadwinners and this has changed the dynamics of the relationships, both among parents and in-laws.

Barnali often visits Anudip and other training centres and talks to the girls, explaining how best to navigate their lives for those who are keen to pursue similar career paths. Having herself relocated for her career and continuing it post-marriage and a child, she provides a live example to girls who fear that their investment in a career would be rendered useless or a waste of their marriage and motherhood.

The company in turn has devised a set of policies to ensure that they do not lose their highly trained and qualified workers due to marriage or motherhood. These include extended leave periods for marriage and motherhood, six months of paid maternity leave, work-from-home arrangements for new mothers and a fully subsidised employee assistance platform for wellness.

Arfana Khatoon, a staffer from the Metiabruz centre says she worked remotely after she relocated post-marriage and more recently even after she became a mother, she has been able to continue with her job and career, thanks to the flexible policies adopted by her employer. Her colleague Mushtari Fatma (also at Metiabruz) whose in-laws were initially against her working outside the house (she temporarily quit) has over time managed to convince them and is now back at the job. For the last two years, the company has organised mother and mother-in-law days at its centres that give a peek into how their daughters or daughter-in-law's daily lives pan out, which has made the older generation more supportive and set their minds at rest. Apprehensions they might harbour have faded away, thanks to these interactions.

More than any other factor, the economic prosperity the jobs have brought for the families concerned has spurred a change in mindset in the wider community. The old, conventional thinking that a woman's place was only within the four walls of a home is beginning to give way in these highly conservative circles. The fact that women like Barnali or Zartaj are able to contribute meaningfully to the family’s economic well-being has changed the dynamic of the rigid and set-in-stone equations, giving them a greater say in all matters. They are no longer dismissed, brushed off or viewed as liabilities.

With the excitement palpable in her voice, Zartaj tells this writer that there has been a sea change in the way her family views her and her career after she recently contributed financially towards buying a new house for the family. Not only are her in-laws and husband who runs a grocery store (while she works in the field of artificial intelligence!) highly supportive of her work, but her status in the community has risen manifold with girls seeking advice on how they can emulate her trajectory including landing a job in iMerit - which is now quite well known in the region. At family weddings and functions, she is often surrounded with many seeking her counsel on how girls within their families can follow her path and she’s delighted to see the pace of change she perceives in her community’s thinking from the time she graduated to now. As Claire Booth Luce, an American public figure and politician once said, a woman’s best protection is a little money of her own.

(Note to Readers: This content was commissioned by Omidyar Network India. We are bringing readers an abridged version of the original.)

(Anjuli Bhargava is a senior writer and columnist based in Goa.)