Now, drivers, painters get their very own job site in Bangalore

Babajob seeks to bring the social-networking revolution to people who do not even have computers. And the start-up is just one example of an unanticipated byproduct of the outsourcing boom.

“In Redmond, you don’t see seven-year-olds begging on the street,” said Sean Blagsvedt, Babajob’s founder, referring to Microsoft’s headquarters in Washington State, where he once worked. “In India, you can’t escape the feeling that you’re really lucky. So you ask, what are you going to do about all the stuff around you? How are you going to use all these skills?”

Perhaps for less altruistic reasons, but often with positive results for the poor, corporations have made India a laboratory for extending modern technological conveniences to those long deprived. Nokia, for instance, develops many of its ultralow-cost cellphones here. Citibank first experimented here with a special ATM that recognises thumbprint — to help slum dwellers who struggle with PINs. And Microsoft has made India one of the major centers of its global research group studying technologies for the poor, like software that reads to illiterate computer users.

Babajob connects India’s elites to the people who need jobs but lack the connections to find them. Job seekers advertise skills, employers advertise jobs and matches are made through social networks.

For example, if Rajeev and Sanjay are friends, and Sanjay needs a chauffeur, he can view Rajeev’s page, travel to the page of Rajeev’s chauffeur and see which of the chauffeur’s friends are looking for similar work.

Blagsvedt, now 31, joined Microsoft in 1999. Three years ago he was sent to India to help build the local office of Microsoft Research, the company’s in-house policy research arm. The new team worked on many of the same complex problems as their peers in Redmond, but the employees here led very different lives outside the office than their counterparts in Redmond. The company’s Indian employees were not seeing poverty for the first time, but they were now equipped with first-rate computing skills, and many felt newly empowered to help their society.

At the same time, Microsoft was plagued by widespread software piracy, which limited its revenue in India. Among other things, the company looked at low-income consumers as a vast and unexploited commercial opportunity.

Poverty became a major focus in Blagsvedt’s research office. Anthropologists and sociologists were hired to explain things like the effect of the caste system on rural computer usage. Blagsvedt stumbled upon an insight by a Duke University economist, Anirudh Krishna.

Krishna found that many poor Indians in dead-end jobs remain in poverty not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack the connections to find them. Any Bangalorean could confirm the observation: the city teems with labourers desperate for work, and yet wealthy software tycoons complain endlessly about a shortage of maids and cooks.

Blagsvedt quit Microsoft and, with his stepfather, Ira Weise, and a former Microsoft colleague built a social-networking site to connect Bangalore’s yuppies with its labourers. (The site, which he started this summer and runs out of his home, focuses on Bangalore, but he plans to spread it to other Indian cities and maybe globally.)

Babajob pays anyone, from charities to Internet cafe owners, who finds job seekers and registers them online. (Babajob earns its keep from employers’ advertisements, diverting a portion of that to those who register job seekers.) And instead of creating an anonymous job bazaar, Babajob replicates online the process by which employers hire in real life: through chains of personal connections.

The model is gaining attention, and praise. A Bangalore venture capitalist, when told of Babajob, immediately asked to be put in touch with Blagsvedt. And Steve Pogorzelski, president of the international division of Monster.com, said, “Wow…. It is an important innovation because it opens up the marketplace to people of socio-economic levels who may not have the widest array of jobs available to them.”

Krishna, the Duke economist, calls it a “very significant innovation”, but cautions that the very poor might not belong to the social networks that would bring them to Babajob. The company has drummed up job seekers on its own, sending workers on to the streets with fliers promising employment.

To find potential employers, in addition to counting on word of mouth among those desperate for maids and laborers, Babajob is also relying on Babalife, the company’s parallel social networking site for the yuppie elite. People listed on Babalife will automatically be on Babajob, too.

So far, more than 2,000 job seekers have registered.