Licence to skill: Taking women to a new high

It’s a recruiters’ market out there as they get increasingly choosy, leaving job-seekers in a state of lurch. But amid all this, a few non-traditional jobs are still alive and kicking – creating niche avenues in an otherwise bleak hiring season.

Mala Ghosh is like any other B Com graduate. But with no additional  fancy qualifications, she recently bagged a job that most job hopefuls can only dream of. Her work neither requires much travel outside home nor compromises her social life. Neither does she have to deal with nagging bosses nor inquisitive colleagues nor meet any pressing targets. In fact, “it’s apt for someone who had quit working after marriage”, says Ghosh. All it involves is booking airline, train, bus tickets and phone recharges. What’s more, she manages to earn some decent `20,000-25,000 every month.

She is not alone. Like her, some 50,000 women across India are employed as sahayaks or facilitators, engaged in activities like mobile and DTH recharges, rail-air-bus-cinema bookings and bill payments. Armed with a basic education of up to class 12 and above, adequate English and communication skills and knowledge of simple calculations, these sahayaks are out in the field, earning anywhere from Rs5,000-40,000 per month.

Says Anand Shrivastav, CMD of Beam Money, an RBI-authorised payment service which trains and deputes these sahayaks: “We train them on how to make the bookings and payments and polish their communication and calculation skills. They are then ready to work as facilitators in their free time.”

A typical sahayak serves a catchment of 250 households on an average and through word of mouth manages to scale up that network, says Shrivastav. For every booking or bill payment, they receive some commission that makes up their earnings. So, from a starting income of `2,000-3,000, “a sahayak can even go on to earn `30,000-40,000 per month, depending on her connectivity and reach,” says Shrivastav.

Says Bijaya Biswas, a sahayak with Beam Money for the past three years: “There have been times I have earned just Rs1,000. But usually, it’s at least Rs6,000-7,000 that I end up making every month.”

At a time when uncertainty in the job market is alarmingly high, the sahayaks’ jobs are quite cushioned against economic ups and downs. “The job nature is such that there will always be demand. People will never stop paying bills or making travel bookings. Thus, we will continue to train and depute more women in future,” says Shrivastav.

Beam Money plans to train and deploy some 25,000-30,000 sahayaks every year. Likewise, jewellery firm Juvalia & You is looking at training some 40,000 people as “stylists” or sales professionals engaged in marketing imitation jewellery in the New Year. Like the Beam sahayaks, these stylists, most of whom are women, get trained by the firm for a couple of hours, following which they are assigned the job of selling.

Similar to a sahayak’s working hours, a stylist’s timings remain flexible, and so is their income. Stylist Poonam Parashar says that at times she does not need to devote more than an hour or two for this activity. “I do it in my free time.”

Says Chaitanya Aggarwal, founder and CEO, Juvalia, “they sell jewellery ranging from `150-10,000, and 25-40% of the amount of jewellery sold is what they take home.”

According to Parashar, she often ends up selling artificial jewellery worth Rs4-5 lakh in a month. “There is demand for jewellery round the year. It peaks during festive occasions. In other seasons too, we see some reasonable demand.”
Such niche jobs do not really go out of demand, says Gaurav Marya, president of Franchise India.

“Being entrepreneurial in nature, the income levels depend on the amount of hours the individual invests rather than any economic factor,” he adds.

There are other useful lessons too. Once people get trained on how to run and manage their small ventures and market and scale up, Marya says, they can become self-employed in the long run.
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