How are Interns faring amidst the Pandemic in India [MID-2020]

Author: Arjun Sabharwal

Date: 16/08/2020 Time: 5:50 PM IST

It’s been about three months into the global pandemic, and things seem to have levelled out around the country. Although there is danger and a lot of fear in the air, the country and the working man are finally recovering from a pandemic which seems to be unrelenting in it’s spread.
In such a time, interns and those who wish to pursue internships have most of all been suffering. Why ?. The Webster dictionary defines Intern as “An advanced student or graduate usually in a professional field (such as medicine or teaching) gaining supervised practical experience (as in a hospital or classroom)”, and herein lies the fault. The intern is an individual which is often least respected in any organisation and often keeping them around is seen as a liability than anything else. Irrespective of how competent or bright they are, keeping them around has it’s risks.They are not normally covered with any sort of medical cover and hence letting them enter the office space during any health emergency, becomes a big risk for everyone.
In such challenging times more than ever, with college being reduced to a few hours in front of your laptop. People are looking for new ways to do new things. A misconception often believed are that interns are fresh out of college, around the age of eighteen to twenty; don’t really need a job. But I can assure you this is far from the case.
Technology has moved into more and more fields today, and automation and other things have made things people have been doing for years rededicate. In these times, interns can be people of the age of 30, even 40. They have bills to pay, and although don’t expect much in financial compensation. They would in the future. They wish to migrate their careers. An example of this could be an IT Professional who always had a love for baking, with workloads reduced, he could intern in his local bakery to maybe grow his hobby into a full-time gig.
Payment to interns often makes them responsible for the work they perform, and hence is essential to trying out various skills.
Today interns are well not doing so good. Interns generically need to be taught and guided. Although this might seem very trivial to an IT engineer who can do practically everything online but is vastly more complex when applied to various real-world business.
Fact is people need to be meet in person, to conduct their “BUSINESS”.

Below is a brief of some issues interns/Students Face

1. Technical Expertise

-Computers and networking are often things which people expect done for them.

People hence go to offices, where they can come to a place and immediately begin working. Refreshments, high-speed connectivity, always-on power, printing receiving physical mail and documents. All this is assumed to be present and we take for granted. We barely even give a thought to these things in the workplace.

In today’s pandemic, well you need to figure out everything yourself at home and youtube is your friend; But yes at the expense of time.

The time you should be working, better learning and doing valuable work to ensure your future employment at that firm. And worst of all, Interns rarely have access to the IT infrastructure and support employees get. So no remote access, or fixing things without you getting into the nitty-gritty

2. Rural Challenges

The way that the job market works in India, people move around. Small city to big, big to huge. Interns more than most people, as a first job or an opportunity to work with an industry leader, would be amazing. But here is the problem, due to COVID-19 you are stuck in a place where there is not stable power or internet.
Even people in urban places are struggling as during the pandemic 90% of all Internet is being consumed by bored people on Netflix and other video streaming platforms. During this time, being pretty much on your own, this further compounds to this fact.

3. Jio, FaceBook and GSM Data

Well, you might think well, I always have my hotspot. Yes. But Facebook recently invested a lot of money in reliance and term Jio Mobile. If one would analyse what happens to companies where facebook owns sign fact stake it is never often a happy story for the customers of the service. A great example of this is Oculus, WhatsApp and even their legacy killed products which were merged into their software stack.

Why should you care?
TLDR -> Facebook is a publicly-traded Advertising firm, they want our data and need to make a profit to stay afloat.
Data rates will rise and by a lot. ( both mobile and broadband; as JIO is a big player offering fibre infrastructure for entire companies. This will affect everyone as jio is the deciding lowest price offer. Which would mean higher data rates for working from home and lack of data privacy which would maybe just end up banning using jio similar to what happened with ZOOM.

4. Laptops + Hardware

Although interns are provided infrastructure from companies to perform company work. A fact is that most interns are not doing essential mission-critical work, and hence are not given the latest state of the art machines and hardware. These fail. Phones, laptops everything has a fixed life, spares require functional supply chains which well are not there today.
Another issue is as of today china and India are in hot waters so global supply chains might be affected for a long while. A repair might not only become impractical but impossible.
Hardware purchases are often a very expensive affair and cannot be afforded by the interns. Also even if parts shipping by the company how would the intern go about fixing it admit a pandemic. I don’t think everyone is brave to open a laptop looking at a tutorial on a laptop.

5. . Cash Flow

The final pillar of this compounding problem is cash flow. Everyone is strapped for money, people rent has piled up. Salaries are being withheld and there is a general sense of chaos in the job market. People are amidst breaking savings, withdrawing provident funds and worse of all; due to lack of work current and future, an intern is not the nicest thing to be currently.

So I’m Screwed? Not Quite

Something rather unexpected happened during this pandemic. People learned that well nothing is impossible. People have been up to all sort of crazy things, social media has shown us That things we thought were too hard are well just challenging enough if you have enough time. Painting, No problem. Plumbing okay let’s do that. Well, I always wanted a new wi-fi. Let’s fix that up. Time is often a luxury we have so little off when we have too much of it we are equally clueless.
Close to 25 Million dollars of content has been released free of cost. Including paid certifications, full degrees via scholarship. It’s never too late to learn something. Stay hungry, Stay Foolish - Steve Jobs.
Reconnect : Finally Family, friends. Pick up the phone, call that old friend? that high school crush goes say hi. You never know where this time will go. Explore your life. do things you did not do. Explore your home, fix broken things around your home. Paint that dirty wall in your society, help someone elderly who cannot do their chores, help that old uncle with his phone.
Being nice does not cost anything.
Yes COVID-19 is yet prevaling, Be Safe; This is not over yet, we are in it for the lang haul.

Do you know why humanity has been around for eonsbeing the most dominant species on this planet? It’s because we have a higher form of thinking and can collectively take decisions on a scale never previously possible. With the internet, Artificial intelligence, machine learning and geneitc ernginnnering. We have a chance to fight back, in a war which we have been historically on the loosing side of.

Covid-19 will be a page, ( hopefully not more than a paragraph) on our evolutionary journey into the cosmos. Lets be happy we can stream tv, or work from home, things which were since fiction just a decade ago.

Let’s Be Human for Once, it’s our Species after All. Kudos !