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FORBES ASIASIDELINES
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Steve ForbesC
orporate-speak billows with
words about vision, sustain-
ability and inclusion. We try
to put a lid on that verbiage in this
magazine, but at a November event
in New York hosted by Columbia
biz school’s Chazen Institute, I got
to hear—entertainingly—from a
practitioner of those concepts.
Manish Sabharwal is chairman
and cofounder of India’s TeamLease
Services, a staffing agency on a grand
scale. In an hour he spelled out not only the case for his company (amid an invest-
ment road show to shore up its $500 million market cap) but for Indian economic
reforms, particularly in labor.
India doesn’t lack for workers but for employable skills. TeamLease itself has to
disappoint 90% of its applicants, choosing maybe 5,000 a month whom it can hope
to connect to employers (“We pray to one [payroll] God”). Most course through
TeamLease to full-time work or other opportunities, but the pipeline is big enough to
challenge Tata for having India’s most private-sector workers. There’s also a vocational
campus in Gujarat for 45,000 learners.
“More than a company, we’re a cause,” Sabharwal says. TeamLease runs on low
margins and makes it up on volume. Geography is part of the test: India needs to
move manpower from population nodes in the north to the bustling job markets of
the south and west. But labor laws also get in the way. Unions, which he says have only
an 8% share, stifle provisional entry points to the workforce. Add up the barriers and
half of India is “self-exploited,” meaning outside the rewards of the formal economy.
The country is a “flailing state, not a failing state,” and Sabharwal has worked with
reformers at the federal and (increasingly important) state levels to reduce “regulatory
cholesterol” and open the job arteries. One key push: to halve payroll taxes, which
he puts at effectively 45%, and broaden the government revenue base. (He backs the
Modi tax and currency moves.) The current Make In India campaign is all well and
good, but in his view the nation has only a decade to put its “demographic dividend”
to work, so to speak. Population levels will converge to a mean.
TeamLease hasn’t yet made one of our Forbes lists (although our Forbes India
licensee has covered it well), but it is staring at big numbers—2 million new hires by
2025?—to go with India’s big challenges. Stay tuned.Work, Work, Wo r k
Tim Ferguson
Editor, forbes asia
[email protected]6 | FORBES ASIA DECEMBER 2017Paymaster: Sabharwal aims to fill India pipeline.