Informality in the Developing World

It is one of the minor miracles of the developing world that trains run hours late, yet people still get where they need to go. Men gather at every family dinner to complain, and the complaint is always about the lack of punctuality — of the trains, the buses, the post, the pensions, the rains, and everything else that is perpetually late. The marvel is that despite this, weddings happen, debts are settled, and lives proceed without central coordination. I see this as an achievement of human adaptability rather than institutional competence.

A driver will refuse to take a fare by the meter but will drive you across town at midnight because you are his ‘regular.’ One may curse the absence of customer service hotlines, but when your water pipe bursts, it is not a ‘ticketing system’ that saves you, but the plumber who answers your brother-in-law’s call.  Formal efficiency has no answer to such loyalty. This reliance on personal connection is frequently called corruption; in reality, it is often the only thing that keeps life moving in an overburdened system where much of the staff is computer-illiterate. What is called inefficiency is often simply flexibility by another name; what is decried as chaos is, to those within it, a form of freedom. This very informality is why companies like Uber or Urban Company face the constant threat of disintermediation in India: once trust is established, the driver or handyman is called directly, cutting out the platform entirely — relationships, after all, are seen as far more reliable.

A few weeks ago, I had occasion to visit the small bank in my hometown where I’ve had a locker for years. My husband jokingly called it “the sort of place consultants go to die.” The entries were still kept in fat, dog-eared registers, their spines holding up thanks only to decades of Indian ingenuity with cellotape. The staff were in no hurry to impress anyone with their know-how of financial terms the way you would find at a corporate bank. A security guard snored gently near the door, his cap tilted at a funny angle. A teller had been struggling to count correctly, which she admitted quite cheerfully, and a cluster of employees were animatedly discussing the cricket match one of their children was to play that weekend, while a couple of clerks dropped sly hints to fish about for an invitation.

I was only their third customer that day. My errand took all of five minutes, but I wasn’t allowed to leave for the next twenty. I was offered a cup of rather weak-tasting chai, roped into fixing a phone bug on an elderly employee’s cellphone (who, one might think, given her daily exposure to cyber fraud, would have been more cautious about handing her cellphone to a complete stranger), and regaled with town gossip. It was, by all modern corporate metrics, a spectacular failure of “productivity”. And yet, my work was done, perfectly and painlessly, in a fraction of the time it would have taken in the labyrinth of formal processes I swim through every day.

Contrast this with the average corporate environment many of us now inhabit. Even a brief conversation near the elevator must be documented if it included any work-related insights. Attendance is verified via biometric scans and meetings are held to plan other meetings, in which nothing of consequence is decided. There is a near-neurotic insistence of quantifying every second of one’s presence because of a deep paranoia that if trust is not monitored, it will be exploited. Creativity is scheduled by means of brain-storming sessions (and dies promptly at 4:59 p.m.), “initiative” is something you request permission to take, and God forbid you ever solve a problem without opening a ticket in the system first.

This is a problem of scale. In small, messy institutions, people accommodate one another because they must; in large, ‘streamlined’ ones, they do so only if they are compelled. In the quest to eliminate the possibility that someone, somewhere, might take advantage of the system, we build systems so hostile to trust that no one bothers to go beyond the bare minimum. The truth, uncomfortable as it is for the high priests of “efficiency,” is that the world runs not only on compliance software and dashboards, but also on those very informal, unmonitored, and yes, sometimes messy human bonds. Economists sometimes call these “unwritten contracts”—the favours, understandings, and unspoken obligations that make societies and organisations run. When a factory worker stays late because his supervisor once covered for him during a family emergency, when an otherwise sleepy guard leaps into action when the building catches fire, when a bank clerk prioritises your request because you helped her fix her phone — these are not inefficiencies. They are the grease in the machinery.

What strikes me most about such small-town institutions is not their inefficiency, but their tolerance of inefficiency. The sleeping guard, the teller who cannot count, the registers in which the ink has faded are the by-products of a world in which human beings are permitted to be human. They can fail, they can fumble, they can spend part of the day discussing a child’s cricket match. And yet, the world does not end. Work is done, life goes on, and no one has lost money because an elderly bank clerk paused to gossip before stamping a form.

Ask any average Indian, and he will say, “Give me the dozing guard and the teller who can’t count any day — at least they’ll offer you chai.” I cannot help but agree.

“Often, too, talking to the peasants and explaining to them all the advantages of the plan, Levin felt that the peasants heard nothing but the sound of his voice, and were firmly resolved, whatever he might say, not to let themselves be taken in. He felt this especially when he talked to the cleverest of the peasants, Ryezunov, and detected the gleam in Ryezunov’s eyes which showed so plainly both ironical amusement at Levin, and the firm conviction that, if anyone were to be taken in, it would not be he, Ryezunov. But in spite of all this Levin thought the system worked, and that by keeping accounts strictly and insisting on his own way, he would prove to them in the future the advantages of the arrangement, and then the system would go of itself.” -- Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy.

Image Source: The Lunchbox (2013)