Tag: midday meal scheme

Losing sight of the agricultural finish line

In The Guardian, Joanna Blythman pokes an important pin into the frustrating but unsurprisingly durable bubble of vegan cuisine and the low-hanging fruits of ethical eating:

These days it’s fashionable to eulogise plant foods as the secret for personal health and sound stewardship of our planet. But in the process of squaring up to the challenge of climate breakdown, we seem to have forgotten that plant foods too can be either badly or well produced. … As long as we demonise animal foods and eulogise plant foods, any prospect of a natural food supply is shattered. We are left to depend for sustenance on the tender mercies of the techno-food corporations that see a little green V and the word “plant” as a formula for spinning gold from straw through ultra-processing.

Hopefully – though I hope for far too much here! – her article will sufficiently puncture the global elite’s bloated righteousness over eating healthy, especially vegan and/or organic, in order to save the planet, when in fact it’s just another instance of doing the bare and suspiciously photogenic minimum to personally feel better.

My own grouse is directed at tech-driven agricultural targets that speak about the producer and the consumer as if there was nothing in between, such as R&D, processing, storage, supply, distribution and trade, all in turn resting on a wider substrate of political-economic issues. The defensive technologist and/or investor might say, “You have got to start somewhere,” but innovators frequently start by targeting a demographic for which the situation might never been too late, instead of the people for whom it already is. Even then, their rhetoric also quickly forgets how misguided and off-target their ambitions are, leave alone losing sight of the problemy problems in desperate need of resolution.

I do think vertical farms are an interesting idea but I also think their wealthy investors and wealthy publicists have made a habit of horribly overestimating the extent to which these contraptions are going to be part of the solution – which in turn has contributed to a widespread sense of complacency among the elite and blinded them to the need for more better and radical changes to the status quo.

Sure, pesticides suck; I am also familiar with accounts that describe how the world produces enough but wastes too much, the tactics of companies like Monsanto; and I recognise agriculture is arguably the oldest human activity contributing to global heating. However, most narratives that provide the counter-view, and some of which also offer supplementary alternatives, gloss over important features of modern agriculture like scale and cost-effectiveness, enabled in turn by the various -icides, as well as the ways in which it is enmeshed in the economies of the developing world.

Ideas like indoor farming have become increasingly trendy of late: just two startups in the US raised $300 million as of last year but their products seem to cater only to upper-class westerners content with a salad-centric diet, seemingly mindless of the millions in third-world countries grossly underprepared to deal with climate change, water shortage, undernourishment and deepening economic inequality at the same time. (Not to mention: the more it costs to produce something, the more it is going to cost to buy without subsidies.)

For many – if not most – of India’s children, eggs are often the sole affordable source of protein. As an elite, upper-caste Indian, I have both privilege and responsibility to change my lifestyle to reduce my as well as others’ carbon footprints1; but in addition, to what extent could I be expected to fight against non-free-range egg production in the absence of guarantees about alternative sources – including lab-grown ones – when ultimately human welfare is our shared concern?

1. I can reduce others’ carbon footprints by reducing the amount of materials I consume to maintain my lifestyle.

The midday meal programme for instance feeds more than 100 million children, with the per-plate cooking cost ranging from Rs 4 to Rs 7; each plate in turn needs to have 12-20 grams of protein. We know pesticide-fed agriculture works because (together with government subsidies) it makes these costs possible, not when it does not damage the world in whatever other ways.

More broadly, there is a limit to which concerns for the climate have the leeway to supersede crop and cattle-meat production in India when the government will not sufficiently protect members of these sectors, often belonging to the more marginalised sections of society, from poverty, insolvency, suicide and death. Axiomatically, “breakthroughs in the development of food” will not move the climate-action needle until they provide alternate livelihoods, upgrade storage and distribution infrastructure, improve access to capital and insurance, and retool the public distribution system – a slew of upstream and downstream changes whose complexity towers over the technological options we currently have on offer.

Fighting climate change is, among other things, about replacing unsustainable practices with sustainable alternatives without sacrificing human development. However, the most popular media and business narratives have given this ambition a Malthusian twist to suggest it is about saving the planet at all costs – and not out of desperation but sheer ignorance, albeit with the same consequences. The dietary movements that promote organic farming, anti-meat diets and, quite terribly, genetically modified foods among the rich are part of this rhetoric. The technologies they bank on are frequently riddled with hypocrisies, most of all concerning external costs, and their strategies are restricted to regimens with their own well-established economies of profitability, such as keto, paleo, detox, etc., over anaemic, stunted, malnourished, etc.

The story here is quite similar to that of electric vehicles. If you are driving an electric scooter in India today, you are still far from helping cut emissions because coal is still the biggest source of power in the country. So without undertaking efforts to produce cleaner power (an endeavour fraught with its own problems), all you have done is translocated your share of the emissions away from the city where you are driving the scooter and to the faraway power plant where more coal is being burnt to provide the power you need. Your purchase may have been a step in the right direction but celebrating that would be as premature as getting to Kathmandu and tweeting you are on your way to the top of Mt Everest.

Claiming to be on the path to resolving the world’s food crisis by putting food on the plate of the already well-fed is similarly laughable.

‘Work from home’ is about culture, not economics

Working from home (WFH) is not for everyone or for every company. It works mostly when individual employees of an organisation don’t need to work together often, or are embedded in workflows where tasks move quickly from one stage to the next. On a personal level, WFH isn’t feasible if you lack self-discipline and/or need the presence of your colleagues people around you to keep you from feeling isolated from company matters or simply, and more distressingly, lonely.

I’ve been employed with The Wire for 38 months now, and have worked from home for 34 of those. As a higher-up editor in the organisation who almost never works with a local team of reporters, I’m constantly looking for productivity paradigms, and hacks, that will keep me going as well as at the top of my game despite being removed from decision-making at HQ. In this context, I recently stumbled upon a seemingly influential study published in 2014 about how WFH can improve employee productivity by leaps and bounds.

I’ve heard a few arguments over the years from various proponents of WFH who cite studies like this to make their point: that there is empirical evidence from the ‘wild’ to show that WFH doesn’t just work but in fact improves employee performance and company prospects. As much as I want WFH to be a thing among organisations with larger workforces (50+ people) and with HQs located in metropolitan cities or megalopolises, I’ve noted with disappointment that most people eager to forward this paradigm often forget cultural impediments to implementing it.

IMO, a decision about allowing regular WFH options is predominantly cultural, particularly in ways that econometric or parametric tests in general can’t capture. For example, many organisations allow people to work from home in exceptional circumstances not because their management is old school but because it needs to be: a large fraction of the urban Indian workforce is not used to being able to work that way.

One big reason this is the case is that “going to office” is part of the traditional mindset of middle-class and lower-upper-class workers. Outside of entrepreneurial centres like Bangalore and smaller pockets of other Indian tier I cities, it’s hard to find people who even want to do this. For example, in my own home, my folks took over 18 months to believe my job was important for The Wire and that WFH was a legitimate way of doing it. The practice is certainly becoming more common but it’s not that common yet in the country.

(A subset reason is that many, if not most, offices in India are better equipped than their employees’ homes are. It’s sort of like the midday meal scheme but in a corporate context. On a related note, you’ll notice that most stock photos depicting a WFH environment show Macbooks on a clean, white table. Where’s the dust da?)

Second, the participants of the influential study cited above were all call-centre employees. This is important because call centres typically have a unique type of office (if it can be called an ‘office’ at all). Its personnel all work individually, not collaboratively, and prize – as the study’s paper notes – a quieter working environment. So the touted “9.2% minutes more per shift” and the “13% performance increase” are both results of employees moving from louder to quieter environments and so answer phone calls better, faster.

To me, this is not a characteristic feature of working from home at all. The study is simply about the effects of the removal of an impediment for employees of an idiosyncratic sector of employment. I suspect the experiment’s effects can be recreated without instituting WFH and simply making their Shanghai office quieter. As Jerry Useem wrote in The Atlantic:

Don’t send call-center workers home, … encourage them to spend more time together in the break room, where they can swap tricks of the trade.

Of course, one could argue that another factor working in WFH’s favour is that the employees are saved the commute – especially in larger cities where the business/commercial district is located in the centre, where costs of living are absolutely prohibitive, and the more affordable residential district is to be found the farther you move away from that centre. Delhi is an obvious example: The Wire HQ is located five minutes from Connaught Place whereas the bulk of its employees are housed in Mayur Vihar or beyond in the east and Lajpat Nagar or beyond in the south – both areas at least 12 km away.

This would be legit except I personally won’t buy into it because I think it’s a failure of urban planning that people have to commute so much, drawing worse lines between their professional and personal lives as well as segregating their daily lives into distinct, monotonous units with only the pursuit of higher efficiency at its soul. I say “worse” instead of “starker” because the line is disappearing in some places where it shouldn’t, such as in the form of carrying a fragment of your workplace on your smartphone, wherever you go, leading employers to assume employees are always available and employees to assume they ought to be always available.

The glamourisation of productivity is everywhere. Credit: Carl Heyerdahl/ Unsplash
The glamourisation of productivity is everywhere. Credit: Carl Heyerdahl/ Unsplash

The attitude of Silicon Valley technology towards free time has been tendentiously wolfish, so much that self-discipline has become one of the greater and rarer virtues of our time. Where workplace laws won’t go, “work anywhere” has almost always been interpreted to mean “work everywhere”. So for a WFH policy to be meaningful, you need people in the office ready to understand the difference instead of gleefully rearing for the leap. This is why I think Slack should shutter its mobile apps or, if not, equip them with features that will allow employees to truly disconnect, beyond the recurring question of self-discipline.

(Remember Fiverr’s ‘do more or die trying’ ad campaign extolling the gig economy?)

Moreover, modern cities are almost exclusively designed to be economic engines constantly looking for solutions to problems instead of being oriented towards fostering healthy communities and communitarian aspirations. By going for the urban sprawl and, as Fouad Khan calls it, the consequential suburban alienation, the modern city organically gives rise to gender bias and class discrimination. From Khan’s essay (for Nautilus):

Like the physical boundaries it draws between commercial and residential zones, sprawl enforces the boundaries set by our roles in society. Specific times must be dedicated to specific activities such as picking up kids from school or doing groceries. The organic social interaction that a city is supposed to facilitate goes missing. Even when time is allocated for socialization as a dedicated activity, it takes the character of a chore like everything else on the calendar. When activities are spatially segregated we find our identities splitting among our various roles, never quite able to bring all of ourselves to anything. Alienation rises. Just as physical access is more restricted for women in these cities than men, the role imposition is also stricter.

(And before you know it, ‘meet spaces’ are going to become commoditised: “For $50 an hour, meet random people in a quiet, safe environment at Watr Coolr. Coffee and biscuits extra.”)

Finally, WFH is most effective when the tools necessary to ensure employees lose as little as possible as they shift out of the office and into their personal workspace are efficacious. And such efficacy is a product of excellent UI/UX, lower communication latency, affordability, access to high-quality supporting infrastructure, etc. But most important is the willingness of those within the office to use the same tools to help keep you, and others like you, in the loop.

For example, a supervisor might be okay with Skyping a WFH employee or two WFH employees might be okay with running things on WhatsApp between each other. But that’s not to say other colleagues will. I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to because using Skype is not the same thing as booting Skype. There’s a cognitive cost to booting Skype: you have to stop thinking about whatever you’re thinking about, think about Skype and then decide to use Skype. This cost only escalates the more such tasks you perform.

This is why I imagine few others would use tech when they don’t have to, thus making it harder for communication-that’s-not-about-work to survive, in effect preserving the misguided prioritisation of gainful productivity above all else. On the other hand, as Useem writes,

The power of presence has no simple explanation. It might be a manifestation of the “mere-exposure effect”: We tend to gravitate toward what’s familiar; we like people whose faces we see, even just in passing. Or maybe it’s the specific geometry of such encounters. The cost of getting someone’s attention at the coffee machine is low—you know they’re available, because they’re getting coffee—and if, mid-conversation, you see that the other person has no idea what you’re talking about, you automatically adjust.

So yeah, WFH works for some people. But it’s not a good idea to expect a company to make a decision about standardising WFH options for all employees based on empirical analyses.

Featured image credit: Ashim D’Silva/Unsplash.