Despite their educational degrees, many young Indians find it difficult to get jobs. Ramesh Swamy, director of the not-for-profit organisation Unnati tells us how they are addressing this gap for the youth in the country.
Ramesh Swamy: We have a programme called UNXT to address the unemployment issue. When Unnati started in 2003 we had a simple programme – train the youth for 35 days and provide them with entry-level employment that would help them earn Rs 15,000 to Rs 20,000.
In 2017 I met the nodal placement officer of the government of Karnataka, and learnt that there are 450 government first grade colleges and 250 Industrial Training Institutes in Karnataka alone, from where over 1,50,000 youngsters pass out every year. Less than 10 percent of them end up getting placement. This means that a large number of unemployed youth are left stranded. Some of them take up agriculture while others join their family’s small business.
We brought in UNXT to help them. We focus on building values, communication and soft skills. This is an intense 165-hour programme that includes blended learning. We started with signing up agreements with various state governments to include it in government college for students in the final year. A bulk of these interventions was in rural areas. The students get a job once they finish the degree.
In addition, any unemployed youth can come to any of our centres and join the UNXT programme for right kind of emplyment. Last year we trained more than 29,000 youth. For this year our target is to train over one lakh youth across India.
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Ramesh Swamy: Unnati started as a cultural organisation in the 1980s. There were three verticals to begin with – Utsav, for cultural events; Shiksha, for funding education of underprivileged children and; finally, funeral services.
By 1993 enough people got to know about us. Several people reached out to us to provide references for jobs. A lot of the children under our Shiksha programme were not able to clear their class 8 and 10 exams. Many of them would discontinue education after that. This made us feel inadequate, and worked as a trigger.
One earning member in a family can make a huge difference to the entire family’s future. All of this put together led us to start Unnati. We asked ourselves, can we give 50-60 jobs every year?
We realised that there are so many people who receive vocational training in various fields but don’t end up getting jobs. Therefore for us it is a must to ensure that everyone who trains at Unnati gets employment. For us 99 percent is not enough.
Also, it is not just about jobs. We understand inclusive growth. The communications skills and intellectual growth of the trainees are also important to us. These are part of the value systems that we want to inculcate to make them feel part of the society and truly transform their lives.
We look at our trainees as change agents in the community and for society. We want to create that ripple effect through our interventions.
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Ramesh Swamy: It’s a programme that we have been building for the past one-and-a-half years. It will be rolled out soon.
Sugam aims to empower women artisans. We come across several women at various fairs who make agarbattis, artefacts, handbags, etc. Despite doing phenomenal work they don’t make much money from this. Their monthly earnings don’t go beyond Rs 5,000.
We want to train and equip women entrepreneurs to think big, assist them in scaling up and boost their earnings. We want to make them realise the power in collectives and how they can optimise their abilities together.
We also see this with individual farmers with smaller landholding tilling their own land. It is only when farmers with small landholdings come together that they can scale up. It is about changing their mindset so that they start thinking as entrepreneurs. We hope to start the first batch of Sugam next month.
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Ramesh Swamy is the director of Unnati.
The lead image shows the students of Unnati at a training exercise. (Photo courtesy Unnati)
