#DappCon22: Day 3 - Hyderabad workFree Experiment: Building A Solid And Ethically Sound UBI Pilot

Transcript

um foreign

foreign okay that was to give you a glimpse of the subject of our talk and our experiment in Hyderabad Hyderabad is in the southern part of India and uh we started a basic in compilate with waste collectors we have about in five different slums we have uh about 350 families to whom we give a basic income for 18 months

these are the basic features of the the project now the reason I gave a glimpse of the waste collector is waste collector this is how I think they come to each house each one has a certain area allotted to them and then government treats them or the city Corporation treats them as self-employed they're not employed by so they have to do this and then put it in the dump yard where the government shows where the dump yard is and then they have to collect money from the houses okay oh that is their income so it we are working with 350 families about 1500 individuals uh waste collectors uh I

mean children and everybody included uh they live in five different settlements in Hyderabad City uh it's an 18-month project each month they get thousand rupees which is 12 dollars per month and children below that uh below 18 they get half of it so the mothers will get on behalf of children the cache directly goes into the bank accounts we open bank accounts to those people who didn't have bank accounts and then we are doing a statistical and the qualitative evaluation we have done a Baseline and then we are doing a midline after nine months end line after 18 months and the post trend line after 24 months of the project the partners of

this project are University of bath UK India Network for basic income Institute for what works for women and it's called iwage and Montfort social Institute and open democracy these are the five Partners we have it's funded by European research Council between 2020 and 2024. yeah so is it does it fit to answer Malcolm's question in the morning does it uh answer does it fit into the definition of uh the basic income by bn's definition it is Cash Cash yes cash it goes into their bank accounts and uh it's Universal the the way we have

defined Universal is that we are working we wanted to work with waste collectors but then we have we go to a slum where waste collectors live so we draw a boundary of that particular slum and then give everybody whether they are doing waste collection or not it's possible that 60 percent of them do waste collection but then 40 percent do other things what doesn't matter so that's how we have drawn the universal uh part of it it's monthly every month they get on the first of the month they get money and then it's individual every man woman and child gets when the newborn arrives he's automatically registered and then he

gets the money and if a new bride comes into the house from outside she also gets immediately registered so those are the additions we have and it's absolutely unconditional so that's the model uh yeah why did we choose waste collectors in fact we chose a waste collectors as you may have seen uh uh these are the lowliest jobs in our society and mostly people from what were considered traditionally Untouchables those are the people coming from rural areas and doing this work in the city

and our hypothesis that what transformation in their lives will take place when you give them an unconditional basic income that is the question we are asking what happens how will they organize themselves in terms of their dignity self-respect and well-being we are not even expecting them to quit this occupation and go somewhere else but we want to see what kind of modifications they will bring in their lives or their children's lives or in their health care so on and so forth so given freedom to make their own decisions that's the bottom up how do they self-organize themselves I think we are entirely banking on their

self-organizing we are not suggesting anything to them it's not our job so is emancipation from Modern slavery possible through self-organization is what we are looking at because it's up to people what they want to do with the additional money now why 18 months uh normal life cycle of recurring household expenses is usually 12-month period and festivals and everything all these things come within a span of one year in previous Pilots we have showed have they have shown that people go through a learning curve which which means the point there is what we don't know we don't know

we can't make assumptions about they will drink it away they will waste the money they will use it for consumption purposes and not for any Investments so these are the kinds of objections people normally have about giving anything unconditionally to people that's why they put conditions that's why they target blah blah blah which Hilda has shown uh so well that they don't work so uh so what we underestimate is the learning curve so there is a learning curve and usually we expect that the initially there's a Euphoria the first three months will be Euphoria you're suddenly getting like Believers saying that their regular income which you are not used to

and sense of security it's psychologically it does a lot to your mind okay so we just give that a cushion for the three months and then the 12 month period is a period when they actually start planning I mean I I was a co-director of a project in madhya Pradesh that was the first basic and compiler project in in India so there we have seen how after two three months they start planning which we don't expect them to so I think the sense of security that okay next 12 months or next 18 months I am going to have this so I think your mind starts operating in a very

completely a different way so the the this 12 months and then three months is for to taper off because they have to come to terms with the fact that it's going to be over okay so that's the logic of why 18 months why 12 dollars um I mean the Indian poverty line is the less I say about that the better so we didn't take that into account it is completely out of date it doesn't say anything about poverty uh so we have taken the world poverty World Bank poverty line of 1.9 below that anybody spending below that living below that is considered to be uh poor so it's 57 a

month which means that 4 500 rupees uh a month so an average family income of these people is roughly about 120 dollars of the household so average family size is um about five to six people in each house so there could be like in a typical family three adults a grandmother and a couple and their two children so total basic income they would receive would be four thousand rupees it's individual it's not to the household so about which comes to about 40 percent of their income imagine yourself you'll get you get 40 percent on top of your existing income

it's quite significant by any uh any standard so we expect that that 40 top up is going to make a a big significant impact on the household economy uh uh okay I think this is really the heart of the matter that what kind of ethical protocols we follow uh in this project because I will come to the ethical legal part later but the first principle in any trial is Do no harm you may or may not do good but at least don't do harm to people which is what Hilda started her speech with

don't around with the poor don't do that if you are not if you are not if you are not following an ethical protocol don't go there okay so Do no harm then the constant we took consent from each adult participant for participation in two things one is to participate in the program cash transfer to receive cash transfer and the second is to participate in our research okay we have ethics committees at all levels in University of bath we have we have Ethics Committee ethics board in in India and each of these organizations have their own Ethics Committee so we do a periodic review and we take um approvals from them

all data is to be anonymized uh and shared with the team members and no personal data will go outside India outside so we we have certain protocols how we do that I think University of bath has developed ways of doing it and the exit process which is the most painful of any in any trial is well laid out and what we want to do how to go about and actually there will because we have the local partner who has been working with them with these uh waste collectors last 10 years on their housing rights so they will continue to do work now the question of the the ethical why the ethical protocol is extremely

important is it may be something maybe legal Behavior but it may not be ethical I'll give you examples one or two examples of in our capitalist society that when you normalize evil it becomes invisible I'll give an example of what happens in advertising all of you know advertising is a person is giving you witness that this I have used and this is good okay so there is endorsement by so many celebrities okay but in reality they may not be actually using it they may not go anywhere close to that so in Roman Empire the the punishment for false

witness was beheading okay how come we accept it as normal how come we accept that somebody is saying that I'm using this soap and we actually believe that he's actually using that so he's not using that soap okay so it's yeah so but then it is normalized it's legal so it becomes so evil becomes invisible so I think there it's very important for us to ask more and more uh questions okay we had a ethical dilemma I'll give you an example now from this um uh slum the government decided that 120 families government decided to

evacuate half of them 60 families and relocate them in a new housing which government has constructed these these buildings from one day to another they were asked to leave the place because the government wanted to do something the city government wanted to do something now these 60 people 60 families went and occupied these houses there are 300 Flats Now 60 people went there we were about to begin the uh trans cash transfers and then another 60 families came and settled as their neighbors and then another 60s so all the 300 uh Flats were from different slumps and they have nothing to do with waste collection now

what do we do we just look after our people and say that we have nothing to do with you no it's Universal so the fact that these people went and stayed there we have to now think of the other people so we paused we said that let's pause for some time for these people and raise money so we were in the process of raising we are still in the process of raising money for the rest so that is the ethical dilemma in the sense that can we just proceed giving to our people and exclude the other people no you cannot do that I have seven questions uh for technologists uh not that I'm sitting on top and asking those questions I think all of us have to ask these questions

okay this is not moral policing I think these are the seven questions important to ask because who do you work for I said the invisibility of evil who do you work for I think we have to answer that question what do you work for why do you do what you do who is the end user of your work what is your app seeking from the end user what does she do with it what is it doing to her have you thought of the risks in using your app is your app making this world a better place thank you [Applause]