IT'S INTRIGUING. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN FOUR FRIENDS, fresh out of B-school, find jobs in regions alien to their language, culture, and ethnicity? Two years ago, mobile service provider Idea tried to solve this in a commercial, where a Marathi boy working in Kolkata calls up his Bengali friend in Kerala for quick translations, the Bengali calls her Malayali friend in Haryana, who in turn seeks help from his Haryanvi buddy in Mumbai, and so on. Idea even created a language helpline as an extension of the commercial. The idea was one India talking in multiple tongues, but Idea seems to have stumbled upon a major societal change—the emergence of the plug-and-play generation of workers.

The plug-and-play worker is generally young, and relatively rootless. He or she finds it easy to move from city to city, following the call of a career. And unlike the earlier generation of migrant workers—white or blue collar—modern workers don’t settle down in the first port of call; they are willing to pack up and move when opportunity calls, no matter where it calls them.

Organised and unorganised, educated and illiterate, rich and poor, from all sorts of castes, communities, and regions—migrant workers have always defied any attempt to classify them. That’s one of the reasons it becomes so difficult to pin a number to this workforce. The closest that anyone has come to this is in a 2009 UNDP report on migration and human development in India, which estimates that there were 100 million “circular migrants” (poor, seasonal labourers) in the country, contributing to 10% of the gross domestic product. This is just one segment of the unorganised workforce; add the organised sector to this, and the number shoots up. Various estimates show that as many as 110 million Indians will enter the workforce by 2020; the huge difference is job availability across states, and these workers may have little choice but to uproot themselves in search of jobs.

With actual numbers near impossible to get, the best (and most visible) indicator of the impact of plug-and-play workers is the movement of local brands. People are moving and mixing more and so have the brands and businesses that follow them. Even a decade ago, Haldiram’s snacks were not available in South India, and it was impossible to get hold of a Rajinikanth movie in the North. Today, both are available across the country; in fact, Rajinikanth movies are released in Delhi the same day they are in Chennai. A North Indian techie who used to shudder at the thought of moving “down South” is now happy to move to Bangalore or Hyderabad, knowing the same local brands that he grew up with will be available in a neighbourhood store.

An Ogilvy & Mather study in 2010 identified businesses that can focus exclusively on this segment of workers. Undersized refrigerators (for a single person), convenience foods (ready-to-eat as well as ready-to-cook), and even health and first-aid kits, are some of those businesses. Migration has, in effect, created a new category of consumer, and Indian and multinational companies are riding this phenomenon to grow and expand pan India.

ONE OF THE things that most young workers, far from home, miss is the food they grew up with. Santosh Desai, social commentator and CEO at Future Brands, calls food “the umbilical cord to your home”. A study by Ogilvy & Mather in 2011 on the young white collar migrant adds, “Brands that manage to evoke nostalgia and bring back the ‘goodness of home’ will strike a chord with this generation.”

Bangalore-based MTR Foods used this food nostalgia successfully to enter markets and create a national presence. Its upma, idli, dosa, and sambar mixes are available across most of the country. Their move up North started in Munirka in South Delhi, a crowded urban village. Munirka has always attracted South Indians because of Sri Rama Stores, a grocery shop started more than 45 years ago by a Malayali immigrant, T. Ramachandran. It was one of the few places in Delhi that stocked all sorts of provisions used in Tamil and other South Indian homes. This included a range of unbranded pulses and spices, as well as MTR instant foods, which were then available only in the South. Seeing the rising demand for its products, MTR appointed Sri Rama Stores as its distributor for North India, and began focussing on the region. Sanjay Sharma, the chief executive of MTR Foods, now owned by Orkla of Norway, says 25% of its Rs 350 crore sales in FY12 came from North India. The company has already begun marketing its North Indian ready-to-cook foods, which Sharma hopes will create a more pan-India image for the processed foods maker and propel it to Rs 1,000 crore revenue target by 2015.

Another hugely popular brand today is Wai Wai noodles, which is available pretty much across the country. Owned by the Chaudhury Group, a Nepali conglomerate, the brand came to India through Nepali migrants who married into North Eastern families, particularly in the late 1990s. As the North Eastern community started spreading to the rest of India early last decade, thanks to the outsourcing boom and the consequent need for English speakers, they brought their favourite noodles along. G.P. Sah, vice president at Chaudhary Group, says, “We are seeing growth of 30% to 40% in markets such as Bangalore and Kerala, with migrants driving business by introducing it to new people.” The group plans to set up factories in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh with an investment of around Rs 35 crore each to meet the demand. This will be in addition to the factory it already has in Siliguri, West Bengal.

Demand is a given; what matters to these companies is creating availability. The younger crowd of migrants prefer modern, large stores to neighbourhood kirana stores. Damodar Mall, director, integrated food strategy, Future Group, says migrants are a huge driver of business for modern retail.

“The hours invested in understanding migratory dynamics and their needs is a competitive advantage over the traditional mom-and-pop store,” he points out.
One of the signs of a market evolving on the basis of migration is the higher levels of segmentation and micro targeting. Mohit Kampani, chief, merchandising and operations, Spencer’s Retail, has done that by creating a separate ethnic section in key stores. He says members of ethnic groups consider some product categories/brands their own, and once found in a store, become loyal to that store even for other purchases. Thus the product mix in the aisles of the ethnic section in the Kannadiga dominated parts of Bangalore, say Malleswaram, would be different from that in Indiranagar, a far more cosmopolitan locality. A store in CR Park in Delhi will have more Bengali products, and the store in Chembur in Mumbai will have South Indian products.

Mall adds, “We have done studies in Whitefield, Bangalore, and Gurgaon, and found that a snapshot of the dinner plate of a household, with 90% accuracy, can say which state they belong to. So making the red parboiled rice (used mostly in Kerala) available for the Malayali engineer in Gurgaon earns us his and his mother’s goodwill from back home, and eventually his buying basket.”

KERELA COULD WELL BE THE IDEAL CASE STUDY local companies that want to figure out how to cater to the plug-and-play workers from their state. The southern state, an outlier in most social indicators, holds some pointers on the way companies there have reacted to Malayalis leaving the state. Almost invariably, over the years, products and services have followed the Malayali. A number of these have grown into strong national brands today, essentially by using migrants as brand ambassadors. What started out as regional firms, such as Muthoot Finance, Joy Alukkas, Muthoot FinCorp, Manappuram Finance, and Geojit Securities, have trodden this path to develop a national footprint.

The best example is Muthoot Finance. Originally from Kozhencherry, a small town in Pathanamthitta district in Kerala, 90% of its gold loan portfolio is from outside the state. Back in the 1980s, when the company first stepped outside Kerala and opened a branch in Delhi, it was looking to cater to the Malayali migrant community. But it wasn’t long before it realised that Malayalis weren’t the only ones who could be targeted. George Alexander Muthoot, managing director of Muthoot Finance, says migrants from Kerala turned out to be mostly professionals, rather than businessmen or traders, while its big opportunity was in financing the latter.

But Muthoot was an unknown name back then in Delhi and that is where the Malayali clique worked. “The support of the Malayali community was crucial. We used to tell people that if you want to know anything more about our company, ask any of your Malayali friends. Thankfully, most companies had a Malayali working in finance and administration. We were sure that they would have only nice things to say about us,” Muthoot says. Today, of the 4,000-odd branches, 300 are in the Delhi NCR region. Muthoot is so bullish about its national footprint that it chose to sponsor IPL’s Delhi franchise even though it had the choice to go for others in the south.

Geojit BNP Paribas Financial Services, which started out as Geojit Securities, is another financial services firm which has grown with the travelling Malayali. C.J. George, managing director and chief promoter of the Kochi-based company, reminisces, “When we started our branches outside Kerala, their support was crucial. Our first office outside Kerala was in Vile Parle (suburban Mumbai). Malayalis would come from Fort (downtown) to trade with us.” Today, 75% of Geojit’s business comes from outside Kerala, and largely from other sections of the society.

It helps that Malayalis have this incredibly strong skill—and appetite—to sniff out others from the state and create a network. Nisha Susan, a writer currently working on a book on the rather incredible journey of Malayali nurses around the world, makes the point that travelling communities—Marwaris, Gujaratis, or Malayalis—tend to cluster together because it gives access to food, language and culture, and reduces the sense of alienation one feels in a new city. “Malayali nurses, for instance, plug into a system culturally and economically. You migrate because you are plugged into that support system,” she adds.

That’s the system at work when Muthoot (and Manappuram Finance, another of the same ilk) expands. It is known to bring in Malayalis to man its branches outside Kerala, though that is something that it denies, saying it prefers hiring locals. (But a visit to several of its offices in New Delhi shows a predominance of Malayali workers.)
Madhukar Sabnavis, country head, discovery and planning, and regional director, thought leadership, Ogilvy & Mather India, points out that for brands which followed the migrants abroad first, it becomes easier to move to other parts of India. Jewellers such as Joy Alukkas fall in this category which made its presence through a strong association with the Malayali migrant, initially in West Asia, and now increasingly within India.

That experience is also pushing the state government to invest in understanding migration to Kerala. Blue-collar migrant labour from other states has become a fact of life for Kerala which has been facing a labour shortage due to its workforce’s fascination for jobs in West Asia. “What the Gulf countries are for Kerala, the state is for migrant workers from Jharkhand and Bengal,” says Shibu Baby John, the state’s labour minister. Daily wages are on average nearly four times the Rs 80 a migrant labour would earn in their home states. Given the lack of data on this fast-growing population, John’s ministry has launched a survey to estimate the number of migrants and chronicle their lives. As part of this exercise, businesses in Kerala will soon be required to give details of their migrant workers to the government. The results are expected in a few months. The idea, says John, is to address migrant-related crimes, as well as deliver welfare schemes by creating a support system for them.

AFTER FOOD, IT IS ENTERTAINMENT that best connects with plug-and-play workers. Two out of seven commercials that DTH service provider Tata Sky aired this year were linked to plug-and-players. Vikram Mehra, chief marketing officer at Tata Sky, explains the logic. “When people move to a city, there is always an initial struggle to fit in. What easy availability of entertainment from your home state does is reduce the culture shock. What we try and work on is when you unpack, whether or not the [cooking] gas is connected, the TV should run.” Now that’s hardcore plug and play.

PVR Cinemas’ joint MD Sanjeev Kumar Bijli says migration has opened up markets in different cities for regional language movies. Some five or six years ago, there was only one hall where one could watch a non-Marathi, non-Hindi, non-English movie in Mumbai, and these movies were consigned to the morning show. Today, regional language movies are shown in multiplexes in Ahmedabad, Surat, Pune, and Mumbai. Even in North India, which was initially not a market for regional movies, PVR has had some success in showing Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam flicks in Delhi, Gurgaon, West Delhi, and Ghaziabad. Bijli adds that the same holds true for Hindi movies in South India.
Another case of cinema travelling with migrants (and indeed the mixing up of cultures through migration) is in the small town of Perumbavoor in Kerala. Perumbavoor’s local buses carry Hindi signboards along with Malayalam, and boasts of a weekly market for the North and East Indian labourers who throng to work in the town’s timber business. Entertainment in the form of Bengali and Oriya movies (who make up the majority of migrants) is at hand every day at the local Lucky Theatre.

ONE OF THE MOST crucial aspects of plug-and-play is what is brought back home. Earning to send money home remains the raison d’être for most migration. With $70 billion in foreign remittances (according to the World Bank) expected in 2013, India is a lucrative market for international money transfers. But when it comes to the domestic side of the business, market figures become hard to get, primarily due to the many informal channels—money couriers, friends and relatives. A 2010 study by the Centre for Micro Finance at IFMR Research, Chennai, found that 57% of migrants used informal channels to send money back home. Otherwise called the hawala route, this is not the most reliable option as theft and safety issues are rampant.

The more reliable options—through RBI approved institutions such as India Post (154,866 post offices) and banks—tend to be either too expensive (a money order costs 6% of the amount being sent, while a courier service charges 4%), or too cumbersome. State Bank of India and other banks have been pushing non-home branch transactions through networking with banking correspondents and Eko (a low-cost technology-based outlet India’s largest banker State Bank of India created as part of financial inclusion efforts) since 2010. The number of remittances at Eko’s outlets increased by 36% to 398,386 between October and December 2011 from 292,739 between July and September.
That’s still a drop in the ocean. The money remittances market is variously estimated to be worth between $28 billion and $60 billion, depending on who you talk to in the financial services industry. Private players have been quick to take advantage of this space. Kiran Shetty, MD at Western Union India, says, “In Punjab, people from Bihar who till land have a need to store and send money back home. Most of them don’t have bank accounts (65% above the age of 15 in India don’t have one and only 1.9% is estimated to receive remittances to their bank accounts), and to cater to this market we have launched a prepaid card with ICICI Bank and MasterCard.” A worker can buy a card and leave it with his family back home, and then top it up from any Western Union office. The card can be used to withdraw money from any ATM. PayMate, a Mumbai-based financial services company, is testing a similar product in Maharashtra.

The impact of remittances on consumption is significant. New habits and aspirations are trickling down to villages and small towns. Prachi Salve, research associate at The Spending & Policy Research Foundation in Mumbai, says, “In many small towns in India, people are buying urban products such as LCD TVs and smartphones, and that has been enabled by both the exposure to these choices and the money that has come in, thanks to migration and remittances. It has created a shift in buying patterns.”

THE MASS MOVEMENT OF people influences culture and consumption. But for too long, the debate on migration has had political—and negative—connotations, and regionalism helped sustain one too many political careers. This, even when the Constitution, in Article 19-1-e, is unambiguous, stating that “all citizens shall have the right to reside and settle in any part of the territory of India”. The good news is that regionalism can’t, for long, suppress the urge to earn sustenance that has always been the primary driver for all movements.

The integration between ethnicities is largely at an economic level, and there is still resistance in many pockets to outsiders. As sociologist Dipankar Gupta says, “It will take several generations before real cultural integration takes place in India.” But economic integration, made possible because of technology, media, and businesses that move with and feed into the plug-and-player environment, is already catalysing the change. Soon, a time will come when friends will no more depend on each other for that translation tip.

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