DIARYOFTHEHIGHWAYMONK-9 ... Start-ups, focus on driver health monitoring

Ramesh Kumar from Greater Noida 

Several summers ago, Bengaluru-based piles physician (Dr) Parameshwar shared his concerns about how sitting long hours in a single place - yes, sedentary we are talking about - leads to piles. Parameshwar pointed out long-haul truck drivers are plum piles patients next only to IT warriors clued to their desk- or laptops. Being a piles specialist practicing in the cyber city of India, he ought to know. Like HIV/AIDS, he explained, piles patients are ashamed of revealing this malaise openly and therefore suffer in silence. It is curable provided they consult physicians. Miles Without Piles is achievable, he would assert. 

Piles are something the transport fraternity is unlikely to contemplate. For them, driver health begins with a blood donation camp and ends with an eye check-up. Nothing beyond that. The joke among drivers is that everyone finger drivers for spreading HIV/AIDS and yet they want their blood! As far as the eye check-up and the subsequent act of "donating free spectacles" to them are concerned, these eyewear items are rarely worn by the gift receiver because drivers fear that spectacle disqualifies them from driving from the fleet owners' perspective. Why invite job loss? Better to remain vision deficient. Not entirely true, but such a perception does exist. That's why Parameshwar pinpointing the issue of piles made me sit up and examine.

Drivers' health is a serious issue. Their number is in the millions. So a huge target group. Stakeholders engage in perfunctory health checks via periodic camps. The seriousness of drivers' health by the interested parties can be gauged from the fact 99% of the trucks carry no First Aid Box, though it is a punishable offense under the CMVR norms! Who cares! 

Even the Narendra Modi government has not considered it worthwhile to include truck drivers among the Frontline workers category who ensured nonstop supply of essential items and medicines etc in the current Covid19 ambiance. 

Why such a long preamble? Covid or no Covid, the safety of cargo and vehicle hinges on the driver. An unhealthy or uneasy driver inside the cabin while on the roads is a risk. Drivers' health needs constant monitoring. It is doable. 

Buttonhole any Genext transporter with a sizeable fleet or the new age heroes para dropped from the precincts of IIMs/IITs and enquire their USP. Technology, it will be.  They track everything: driving behavior, the number of times he applied the brake, over-speeding, fuel consumption, halting frequency, etc., courtesy of the Global Positioning System or GPS. If the driver works for high-intensive safety shippers - the likes of Castrol, Shell, Linde/Praxair, etc - the in-cabin camera will capture his every single move. Real-time, being watched from a remote control tower. Welcome measures from every perceivable angle. 

All these initiatives are to ensure logistical efficiency through external monitoring. How about looking inward for a change using the same technology? I am talking about real-time monitoring of driver health. How about using wearable devices that are no longer a novelty? 

Drivers, wearing one of these devices, can automatically transmit data in real-time and automatically about their blood pressure, body temperature, eye movement, breathing problems, etc to the remote control tower.  Inadequately ventilated and un-ergonomically designed driver cabins increase fatigue, a key factor leading to accidents and fatalities on highways. In India, it is hot all the time. Temperatures hovering above 40 plus outside. Add the heat emanating from the engine inside the cabin. These inconveniences drivers and results in fatigue. The remedy is simple and readily available and stakeholders "love" embracing technology. Doable and affordable. 

What about drivers' resistance to such real-time monitoring? A decade ago, GPS is viewed as an "invasion of privacy" by the driver community and fleet owners felt GPS was an additional cost, not realizing better turnaround time or less idling, stopping fuel theft, etc. It was truly a strategic investment. GPS has become a norm once shippers played a nice game: favoring GPS-fitted vehicles. Fleet owners, needless to say, fell in line without a murmur. Perhaps it is time for shippers to repeat that model. Ready, shippers? 

Mumbai-based Bhavesh Solanki concurs that getting the buy-in of drivers is a challenge. However, he has managed to sell his IFreightBox software solution to fleet owners at home and abroad. His two-year-old company has entered the markets in Mexico and Germany. He disagrees with the notion that it was the "cost factor" that fetched him orders. "Not at all. Our solution was more user-friendly and accessible on all types of devices," adds he.  

IFreightbox, Solanki concedes, has not given thought to incorporate the health parameters of truck drivers in his solution so far. "It is a nice idea. I shall look into it," adds he. This should not be a challenge in the nation of cyber warriors that caters to the global market. Is it too much to ask these IIM/IIT alumni-bred startups to generate a few more lines of code in whichever language they are proficient to enhance driver health? This extra feature will have a positive feedback from fleet owners and shippers  because their prime concern of cargo and vehicle safety is addressed. Self interest, no doubt. 

DIARY OF THE HIGHWAY MONK-8 ... Manufacturing vs Services jugalbandi

Ramesh Kumar from Greater Noida

Reading Sanjeev Bikhchandani of Info Edge's interview in The Economic Times (26 July 2021) where he talks about his investment in Zomato in 2010 and how much he reaped in the recent blockbuster IPO of the internet food delivery company, I halted and re-read this portion a few times:

"If you consider where growth and jobs have come from in the Indian economy over the last four decades, it has mostly been from companies and industries that had not existed earlier - IT Services, ITS enabled services, private sector banks, private sector insurance companies, private telecom companies, e-commerce, internet companies, organized retail, private TV channels, and several others. Old mature industries generally do not create as many new jobs. That's why startups are especially important. At its peak, before Covid 19, the Zomato rider fleet was around 250,000. A similar number of people were working for Swiggy. This is the impact of just two start-ups." 

Old matured industries generally do not create as many new jobs! 100% true. Look at the numbers he quoted: 250,000 for Zomato alone. It is no secret that the manufacturing sector's contribution to GDP is stagnant around 16% and, less said about its job generation capability, the better. We are not talking about the Covid 19 situation. For decades, manufacturing began to play a second fiddle to the service sector which is notching upwards of 50% 

Zomato, in a sense, is an internet-enabled logistics company engaged in the food delivery business. Yes, algorithm-driven in the background and uniformed foot soldiers in the front delivering food items to the online buyers. What could be the composition of workforce at Zomato? Backoffice for order processing, sales and marketing team and last but not the least, the delivery executives, mostly on motorized two-wheelers. The last segment must be like an ocean because they are the foot soldiers helping the organisation. Do they create or manufacture anything tangible? No. They don't make Maruti Suzuki cars. But Yes. They create customer delight. Of course, Zomato rides on the back of a lot of manufacturing activities: base kitchens or restaurants whom Zomato serves and the suppliers to these base kitchens, fuel for delivery executives' vehicles, thus making oil marketing companies to be happy. Not to be left is the makers of motorized two wheelers. Plus labor contractors supplying delivery executives. Actually the list is endless. 

Bikchandani's observations triggered  me to trace Maruti Suzuki Chairman R C Bhargava's book  "Getting Competitive: A Practitioner's Guide for India", released in 2020. To establish an equitable society in India, the dependence on agriculture has to come down and job opportunities have to be created outside farming, argues he. Where? "Such employment could largely be only in the manufacturing and from activities arising from industrial production. This would include construction, services, mining, infrastructure building, and so on," he writes. 

Bhargava, a veteran bureaucrat-turned-business head, cautions that "without visible and substantive progress in that direction (industrialization), our stable democratic structure would inevitably come under greater strain because of the changed and higher aspirations of the youth. The young are no longer as patient and as fatalistic as the young were in the past. They expect democracy to yield results". By "results" he means jobs to earn a livelihood.  He is hinting at social unrest if jobs aren't there. 

Bikchandani's assertion that matured companies generally do not create more jobs is because they prefer to go in for automation or mechanization of operations. Not to be ignored is the talk and action in some quarters about the use of technology and artificial intelligence. Bhargava agrees that greater use of technology etc would automatically reduce direct employment in factories: job loss is inevitable if production remains static.

However, he argues that better use of technology and artificial intelligence would lead to better quality and lower cost, leading to better value to customers and higher sales. He adds export potential as well which would add to the top and bottom line of businesses. Bhargava points out that China excels in low technology products and captured the global market. A high volume of these products does not warrant advanced technology.  Cost competitiveness and productivity, according to Bhargava, would be doable with low technology too. 

The 'Make In India" campaign of the government has to be seen in the light of the desire to increasing the size of manufacturing from 16% to 25%. Various measures mooted and being rolled out are to improve the ease of doing business in India. Not an easy task but doable. 

"Everyone loves manufacturing jobs," writes Sarah O'Connor in an op-ed piece in the Financial Times and cites the fixation with manufacturing in the United States by former President Donald Trump and the current one: Joe Biden. Over the past several decades, matured economies have gone in for outsourcing of goods from labor-cheap economies - mostly in China. Now, in the current pandemic and anti-China climate, "nearshoring" or "make in one's own country" is the theme song everywhere. 

O'Connor draws attention to the Tony Blair Institute's economist Jeegar Kakkad on the same topic wherein he asks: "Do you want to increase the jobs if the jobs that are coming back are the lower-skilled, lower-productivity end" We don't want to be competing on labor costs, that's a precarious position in global value chains and that shouldn't be the ambition for workers."

Developing economies like India have to focus on upskilling the existing workforce and simultaneously groom a more tech-savvy workforce to engage in manufacturing. Early indications are there to see in the form of Manufacturing 4.0. Walk into any small and medium enterprise, you cannot escape noticing some form of automation/mechanization. Not out of love but out of compulsion from the end-users whom these business enterprises serve. 

Technology creep is inevitable. Maybe slow. To be alarmed or not? 

According to the IMF, the pandemic is hastening a shift in employment away from sectors more vulnerable to automation. Nobel prize winner Joseph Stigliz is quoted saying that the extra costs of Covid 19 are accelerating the development and adoption of new technologies to automate human work. 

"Predictions of a world without work will continue. This is because the enduring fear of the march of the machines is not the result of a dispassionate analysis of the evidence. It could hardly be so when centuries of technological improvement have never led to widespread structural unemployment. Countries with more robots tend to have less joblessness, not more," opines The Economist. 

It says, rightly that the deep-seated fascination with and fear of technology reflects many economists' concern to get policymakers to pay more attention to the job prospects of people with the least marketable skills, who are always most vulnerable to economic shifts and shocks. 

 Manufacturing and services go hand in hand. Bhargava touches on this aspect as well. "Manufacturing activity leads to the creation of large employment in several service sector areas. These jobs would not be there if manufacturing activity did not take place," says he. Fully agree with him.