During a summer break back in college, I spent two weeks teaching at a residential school in a rural hamlet in Jharkhand, Tamar. A certain memory from that time is quite beloved to me; it was a rather sultry evening, and we were experiencing a power-cut. I was talking to the teacher who taught history in the 6th grade and was upset that the students didn’t seem to understand the purpose of the subject. Over the course of the conversation, we came up with a way to get the students more involved in the teaching process. We gathered in a circle in the school compound, each recollecting a past incident they have heard from their parents or grandparents and why they consider it to be important. Once everyone got sufficiently engaged, we gradually shifted the conversation to how history as a subject has a lot to offer. Simply by swapping the norm with a different pattern of communication we were able to catch the attention of a bunch of restless 12-year-olds.

Fast-forwarding to some 4 years later, I was back in Jharkhand, as a research associate with Good Business Lab (GBL), a not-for-profit research organization focusing on worker-wellbeing and labor innovation, who was designing an impact evaluation of a scheme for adolescent girls and young women. The project was enormous in its scope and outreach; it was being implemented across 17 districts in Jharkhand, with 6,80,000 beneficiaries. The scheme had a novel combination of life-skills training and vocational training and formal and non-formal academic support, to be availed by a subset of the beneficiaries.

I had joined the study at a time which was rather wholesomely precarious, the first wave of COVID-19 still hadn’t peaked. I was, incidentally, stuck in our family house in Ranchi all by myself, grappling with the lock-down-induced isolation, and navigating my way through what was my first proper (and unwarranted) encounter with the demands of adulthood. In the midst of all this chaos, this opportunity was finally something that I could look forward to. It was my chance to understand the issue of female labor force participation, which has been falling in India over the past few decades (ILO, 2015*), and the role of evidence-driven research and how it informs policy, through an academic lens. It was also a chance to further ossify my deep-rooted love for and fascination about the Chotanagpur plateau, its culture, its people, and its verdant terrain, in a more meaningful way.

But a pandemic of this scale can significantly alter the reality, and our perception of that reality, as well as our expectations from it, are slow to catch up. What is even slower to align is our perception with that of others, be it with the various stakeholders involved in the implementation of a project or our colleagues, especially at a new job, given that the usual conduits of communication were disrupted. And communication was of key importance for the implementation of the project, to take stock of things that were going right, but also of those which weren’t.

Our study involved an RCT wherein interested and eligible candidates who were all beneficiaries of the scheme were randomly matched to a vocational training program. The matching was to be done on the basis of a deferred acceptance algorithm, which was also designed by GBL, for which we needed two sets of information from the field. For a given set of vocations, what was a candidate’s order of preference over them, and for a given set of interested candidates, what was their suitability assessment as per the trainer for a vocation. The efficacy of this depended significantly on whether the interested beneficiaries were able to understand the different options they had, the scopes and opportunities each vocation could provide, and what would pursuing it entail, similarly it also depended on the capacity of a training service provider to assess all eligible and interested candidates in his district.

Given the ongoing pandemic, and the diverse geography and hence limited internet and cellular access in Jharkhand, it wasn’t always possible to connect with those who supervised the implementation of the project on a daily basis. For this project, this interaction was further complicated by the fact that a lot of the data was being collected through and stored in the project management information system( MIS), which was being overseen by one of the external partners. Hence, it was important to establish the right channels whenever we had an opportunity and to refine them over time to best align with the needs of our study. It also helped us refine our study design to reflect the ground realities or look for additional resources that would be necessary to be able to implement it. For example, our randomization depended on there being more interested candidates for all the available training programs as compared to the number of seats available for them, however, the data showed a lot of bunching for some of the programs, and barely any takers for the others. Eventually, we realized that it was primarily due to lack of sufficient information regarding the career opportunities post the training programs and hence we required additional resources such as pamphlets with details of the training circulated amongst the girls. Even with an application in place and access to a smartphone to collect data on, sometimes the facilitators who implemented the scheme at the hyperlocal level in a village would have to ply an interested candidate to the nearest area that had network coverage to be able record her preferences, on their scooters. These came up as anecdotal evidence once we were able to interact with people on ground in a more uninhibited manner, but it flagged to us a crucial drawback of using technology to collect data in remote. Establishing channels is more complicated albeit necessary in certain situations; it is not possible to get a detailed picture of the field reality by just talking to the partners. At some blocks in a district called Khunti, we observed that most girls were interested in entrepreneurial training and there were barely any takers for the vocations that involved wage-earning jobs. In other districts, we had observed similar patterns but the concerns, according to the beneficiaries, were primarily an unwillingness on their and their parents’ part to move out of their village, which was a prerequisite for the placement for wage-earning jobs. But in these blocks in Khunti, we found that there was an added concern of trafficking, which was known to happen in these regions. It was only after we were able to establish a proper safe space and garner the trust of the AGs that we found out about this and could suggest to the implementation team to address the relevant concerns during counseling sessions.

A safe space to voice fears, and discuss failure was also critical for me as a part of this new organization I had joined. Remote onboarding and working in isolation meant that there weren’t enough opportunities to casually transact in incidences of failures, shortcomings, and struggles, be it about learning something new, or the inability to meet a deadline owing to burnout. As a research associate, you finally get to learn a lot of things that you’d hoped would be part of the curriculum in your formal education, but weren’t; such as handling and cleaning data, working with a research design team, and learning in details about a randomized controlled trial and the required econometric tools. A lot of these things were new to me when I joined GBL, and since ways to establish networks weren’t immediately apparent, I too had to falter around till I was able to properly communicate my needs and struggles and ask for help. And here’s a fun fact, turns out I wasn’t the only one grappling with learning new concepts.

Discussing and normalizing failures and shortcomings as a part of a learning process can improve efficiency if we can just figure out how to communicate it right. After almost a year and a half in Jharkhand, trying to navigate our way through a complex network of partners and stakeholders, looking for a potential space for voices to be heard and included in solving a problem is something that I have come to value, because in the worst-case scenario, everyone ignores them and then wonder what could have possibly gone wrong, and in the best, we acknowledge them and hope to solve the current hindrance and move on to the next, and we have also managed to capture the attention of our own restless selves.

* ILO (2015). Key Indicators of the Labour Market 2015 (KILM) Database. Online. LFEP Database, 7th edition (January 2016 of the 2015 revision).