THE KNOWLEDGE WE CANNOT KEEP
T he statistics that we all have learned to applaud, and I have started to mistrust. Last year the Department of Foreign Employment issued around 839,000 labour approvals, the most we have ever recorded. About 3.5 million Nepali workers migrate for work, i.e. approximately 1 in 7 of us. The remittance is close to a quarter of our GDP. This is a reason for celebration in most homes, it checks the education bill of children, comforts ageing parents, builds homes, to name a few. It has
undoubtedly enhanced the lives of families back home.
But I read that number and have a visceral feeling, something closer to worry. The reason being I am someone who has chosen to work here. I run a factory.
Before starting British Color Industries, I worked as an industrial raw material supplier for a decade. That decade gave me insight into the businesses in Nepal. The fundamentals of trading business are very clear. Your value lies in the stock you have, your
landed cost, demand situation in the market. You lose a member from your team, you hardly miss a dime. You hire someone new, your business is intact.
Manufacturing works on different fundamentals. A great product is carefully curated by skillful hands and knowledge that builds over a period of time. One slip of observation can spoil the entire batch. Experience carries substantial weight in determining how the produce turns out.
This is the ground on which the national glorified storyline collides
with my working reality. A new hire takes around three months before I can entrust them to handle the process independently. I consider it as a cost of new hire, and that is fine. The actual issue is that you rarely get a return on that investment. You incur the cost of training the new hire, you finally have a capable person, and then the forces that fill those government sheets pull them away. The wage bills in dollars from recruiters of Qatar, Malaysia is something no honest Nepali factory can compete.
How do you measure this loss? If you only consider the cost of replacement, you are not accounting for the actual damage. Think for a moment about how a business grows. It grows not simply by increasing the number of people employed, but when people learn necessary skills, do their jobs well, and build upon their skill sets. They develop the institutional memory that enables a company to attempt things that were previously impossible. When your ‘normal’ is ‘retraining,’ you never get to start ‘compounding.’ The creation of institutional memory never becomes a reality; you are just trying to patch the vacant spots. What Nepal loses is not only hands, but what those hands would have built here. Those hands would have built Nepal. You cannot count a factory that was never built.
And yet, one part of my factory does compound, though it took me a while to understand the underlying forces. More than 60% of my skilled workforce is female, and their tenure is starkly different. A male worker trained on the floor is often gone within a few months, compared to a female worker whose average tenure ranges between a year-and-a-half to two years. That is for the same work, same pay, and different outcomes based on gender segmentation.
I can take some credit for that gap. We pay women at par with men for the same work, which is rare in factories
across the country. We do not define the capabilities of our workers based on their gender. We entrust them with skilled roles and responsibilities. I have seen that if you pay a woman fairly, invest in her, and help her become genuinely good at something, she becomes a valuable part of your team. This is an understanding I find lacking in most employers.
But my management is not the whole story. Looking at the statistics, nine out of 10 Nepali workers leaving for foreign employment are men, and the women who do go abroad for work are largely channelled into domestic and caregiving jobs, not production floors. So, when I train a man, there is a similar job abroad with dollar payments competing for him. The same is not true for a female worker. Part of my retention is the work culture I built, part of it is the limited opportunities for women in society at large.
This stark difference in the characteristics of the two segments of workers is something every serious Nepali manufacturer should understand. Women workers are serving as a stable part of skilled manpower in my company. In an economy that exports its men, the people best positioned to help you compound effectively may be the women whom everyone else continues to underestimate.
That is why our national conversation about the economy frustrates me. Why? Because I deeply want our economy to succeed. We talk about import substitution, making
things here what we import, keeping the value within our country and help creating jobs. But do we really mean it, does it translate into our actions. You cannot staff an industry whose skilled people have a ready passport and just a call away from leaving. The remittance we celebrate and the manufacturing base we say we want are competing against each other.
I do not have a clear solution to this problem. I cannot out-pay the foreign recruiter, so wage is certainly not the answer. It is a harder question than any single manufacturer can solve. If we really want to build that manufacturing base, we need to architect an environment where staying here is a real choice rather than a sacrifice. That means improving the conditions we create for skilled people, increasing the value we let them accumulate at home, and honestly treating retention as a matter of national priority.
The cost I am bearing is the cost of running a manufacturing unit in Nepal, one that every other manufacturer also bears, as it is part of the current architecture. So, before we applaud that number, we must pause to ask what real cost we are paying for the very thing we claim we want to build.
Anuja Saraf Agrawal is the founder of British Color Industries Pvt. Ltd., a Kathmandu-based manufacturer of automotive refinish and wood coatings, and a participant in the Stanford Seed Transformation Programme. She was recognised as a Business Role Model 2024 by Women In Management, Malaysia.
