Motivating Workers in Context to Indian Worker
The front line of the development endeavour is made up of hundreds of thousands of community workers worldwide. As educators, healthcare providers, administrators, and auditors, these professionals aid in resolving the “last mile” issue in the development process. In addition to monitoring and assessing, they are in charge of actually delivering the services while operating with limited resources and technology. It is not hyperbole to argue that without them, development would not be able to reach some of the world’s most challenging, isolated, and impoverished areas.
The centre of this reality is India. Think about the daily responsibilities of female community leaders who work for a non-profit organisation that promotes education, like Pratham. These project managers are essential to many of Pratham’s operations, allowing the organisation to provide services to 19 states nationwide. Their task is by no means simple or unimportant. They have to persuade their families to move out of the village districts and into other areas of the state, leaving their future in the hands of a new organisation. Pratham’s project leaders trek in the midsummer heat of India from hamlet to hamlet, modelling everyday behaviour for community members and offering unwavering support that allows change to be initiated from within. This isn’t a romanticised picture of Indian progress; rather, it’s the practical aspects of running one of the biggest social welfare programmes in the world, which is India. The total numbers in the non-profit and government sectors are astounding. Twenty million government employees work in administrative and bureaucratic capacities for the Indian government, while it is sometimes said that there are up to three million NGOs in India—one for every 400 people.
Though they play a crucial role, not much is known about the motivations of these community-based workers. The provision of services to the impoverished in India and throughout the globe may eventually alter if we can figure out what motivates them rather than believing that it is unquantifiable or immutable.
Just concerned about the money?
By encouraging more effort from employees, introducing pay-for-performance plans and other financial incentives to these individuals may enhance the quality of services provided. For instance, data indicates that government schools in rural Andhra Pradesh had improved results when students’ test scores improved and received minor incentives (Muralidharan and Sundararaman 2009). However, there are frequently barriers to successfully implementing this kind of variable financial compensation in India. The adoption of pay-for-performance in the nation’s civil service and not-for-profit sector requires unwavering effort and patience due to deeply ingrained political attitudes and administrative constraints.
It seems unlikely that financial incentives would always be the best approach to encourage behaviour that benefits society rather than just the individual, even if they could be used more readily in India. Pay-for-performance incentives, for instance, worked well for the teachers in Andhra Pradesh, but they weren’t compared to non-cash benefits.
“Charitable capital”
Our findings imply that non-financial incentives have a tonne of untapped potential. Non-financial incentives, such as social competition, reflections or reminders that help us remember the purpose of our work, and public acknowledgement or expressions of gratitude from the community, could all play a significant role in addressing issues that plague Indian public service delivery to the poor, including access to infrastructure, health, education, and finance.
Each of us has intrinsic motivation, which is a confluence of our sense of justice, morality, purpose, and pleasure that serve as internal barometers for action. When we have an innate drive to make a constructive contribution to our society, we have what I refer to as “altruistic capital.” Our study’s approach allowed us to determine if the non-financial incentives elicited people’s innate drive to support the HIV epidemic, which was a significant addition from our work with hairdressers.
Hairdressers’ reactions to a contextualised game in which they were given money and asked how much they would want to contribute to a well-known charity that cares for HIV patients were one of the ways motivation was examined. Based on this metric, motivated agents who received non-financial incentives sold almost three times as many condoms as those who received the high cash reward treatment. This implies that internal motivation may be evoked by non-monetary rewards. Indeed, the actions of an organisation have the power to create or destroy altruistic capital, just like any other type of capital.
Is it feasible in India?
Experience in Zambia is quite promising, but there are still a lot of unanswered problems. This is especially true for India, where strongly ingrained public service standards may provide a new possibility for non-financial incentives. More productive than moaning about the inefficiencies of an overburdened bureaucracy would be to use labour availability to test and modify effective non-financial incentives that have been found by academics in other settings. We should concentrate academic and policy efforts on innovation in this specific sector in light of bureaucracy, corruption, growing inequality, and subpar service delivery results (even for measures that have been shown to be effective). We may gain by taking a closer look at ourselves and seeing ourselves as complicated human beings with numerous reasons that drive our behaviour if we want to assist India achieve higher literacy rates, better child nutrition, more sanitation, and other goals..