"It's Not Jobs, It's Wages: Pulling India Out of Poverty"

Manish Sabharwal: "It’s Not Jobs, It’s Wages: Pulling India Out of Poverty"

The Nand and Jeet Khemka Distinguished Speaker Forum

Registration and pre-reception at 6 p.m., talk begins at 6:30 - 8:00 p.m.

Hear from the Chairman and co-founder of Teamlease Services, India’s largest staffing and human capital firm. Manish Sabharwal will discuss India’s five labor market transitions (farm to non-farm, rural to urban, subsistence self-employment to decent wage employment, informal to formal, and school to work) that are journeys to a better life for most Indians.

Sabharwal argues that despite India’s demographic dividend (1 million children will join the labor market every month for the next 3 years), India does not have a jobs problem but a wages problem; he will highlight five specific interventions by the current government to raise individual, institutional, and economic productivity.

About Manish Sabharwal

Manish is currently Chairman and co-founder of Teamlease Services, India’s largest staffing and human capital firm. Teamlease has over 140,000 employees in 5000 cities, is setting up India’s first vocational university and is implementing a Public Private Partnership with the new Ministry of Skills for a new employer-led national apprenticeship program. The company has hired 1.4 million employees in the last 10 years.

Earlier he co-founded India Life in 1996, an HR outsourcing company with private equity investors that was acquired in 2002 and consequently he was CEO of Hewitt Outsourcing (Asia) in Singapore for two years.

Manish is a member of India’s National Skill Mission chaired by the Prime Minister and serves on various government committees on education, employment and employability. He serves as a Government Nominee on the Board of the Reserve Bank of India (India’s central bank), a trustee for New India Foundation (this offers fellowships to write books about post-independent India and has so far had 16 published), and is a columnist for the Indian Express. He got his MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.