Vidya Viswanathan
New Delhi
THOUGH several service sectors like
tourism, retail, healthcare, hospitality
and BPO are booming in India,
they cannot find trained staff. The
vocational training system has not kept
up. On the other hand, a huge number
of children and youth in the country
coming from 
marginal and underprivileged
backgrounds have no means of
entering the new economy. The
Hyderabad-based CAP Foundationhas
come up with a programme called “Ek
Mouka” to bridge the gap.
It has placed 45,000 young people
across the countrysofar. The target is
to place 300,000 children within the
next three years. It takes the trust Rs
3,500 to Rs 5,500 and three monthsto
train a youth who may not have gone to
school or may have dropped out in primary
school. The core module consists
ofreading, writing, numeracy, computers,
English, customer relations and
entrepreneurship. At the end of three
months, the trainee whois in the age
group of 18 to 35, is encouraged to do a
field-based assignment which includes
a job survey. The trainee comes backafter having identified a role for herself.
CAP then trains her in specific verticals.The trust has identified 140 job profiles in 10verticals. At the end of the
training, the trainee finds at least one job for herself.
The trust has a team led by Nalini Gangadharan,chairperson, CAP Foundation.
She had in her previous assignment helped set up the Livelihoods Business
SchoolProgramme at Dr Reddy’s Foundation.
Civil Society spoke to Gangadharan about how this programme runs.
How do you identify a sector in the industry? How do you then match that to the target population in the work force?
We have to identify gaps before theyshow up in the market. This is a complex process. We work on secondary data. We talk to top corporate, medium-sized players,banks, trade councils, professional bodies, outlets and dealers in any industry. In early 2000, we identified that there would be ahuge shortage of nurses by 2002-2003. All the 15-20 bed hospitals were converting to 50-80 bed hospitals. The nursing council cameown saying anyone who was not qualified with either a degree or a diploma in nursing could not be employed. So we trainedbedside patient attendants who could administer medication and bathe patients. We held a focus group with the nursing homesassociation. We also found that hospital beds are only profitable if other services are used. So we created a cadre of home healthcare nurses. They are common today, but we had to work out a lot of issues like security, medical standards and attachment to alocal hospital. We create a whole eco-system.
We create a ready-to-work workforce in 10 sectors including tourism, customer relationsand retailing, healthcare, home needs, hospitality, automobile, telecom, call centers and other occupational courses like tailors,florists, plumbers and consumer goods repair. They have borrowed money and have to start work from day one. They do not haveresources for training. A Mercedes showroom picked up two girls from our centres for customer relations. The next two sectors wehave now identified are logistics (ports and cargo) and fashion and accessories. We are going to run a pilot for a large Delhi-basedBPO company where we will combine our training module with their training for voice-based services. They will pay for the training.Corporates are realising what you call a degree is not worth much. Lakshmi, our student, was hired by Ion Exchange to sell itswater purifier worth Rs 2 lakh, door-to-door. She recorded the highest sales among all their salesmen. She was their Chairman’sClubawardee and was flown to their convention to Goa. She also got to explain her strategy at a management school. Kiran,another of our students was photographer Arvind Chenji’s assistant; he is now a photographer and has bought equipment worthRs 15 lakh.
Are you also training people in home services like house cleaning and plumbing?
Mark my words. Two years from nowyou will have no maids. They will all belong to a housekeeping company which will cover you 24/7 in three shifts. I get 24/7 help froma company in Hyderabad. They will know how to work with household gadgets, they will have identity cards and they will get PF, ESI,and gratuity. We train housekeepers for companies which provide the service. We do not deal with individual customers.
What happens after a trainee gets a job?
What we are doing is creating an aspirational platform. Three months into our programme, ourtrainees know that they have to invest in their education. Our record is that 80 per cent of our alumni pursue higher studies; 96 percentof these pass the Class 10 board exams after going through an accelerated learning programme. Andhra Pradesh’s record isthat less that 60 per cent of students clear Class 10. The formal system hates us for this feat. Our first job is just to make trainees feel“I’m worth it” and draw them into the economy. We find computers and knowledge of English does the job. Then we have continuouslearning resources, alumni clubs and business mentors.
Who is your target workforce?
We work with 85 NGO partners. Wework in 10 states with the departments of youth services, urban development, police and women and child welfare. We also work withspecific groups like traffic victims, children in conflict withlaw, someone who could have got into extremist movements and streetchildren. But they are anonymous.
How is CAP organised?
We have 48 centres in 10 states. We have four different domains –community mobilisation, business mentor networking, the learning domain and a teamwhich creates stakeholders and investors. Ourcurriculum is based on self learning, peer learning and experiential learning.
Who are your investors?
Our stakeholders andinvestorsteam mobilises resources. The investors include corporates like Moser Baer, Lucent and Microsoft. There are bilateralagencies likeILO and USAID. Some corporates invest as part of their corporate social responsibility. Some like Moser Baer inGreater Noida want to invest in the community that it belongs to. We are also working with several corporates which are getting land forSEZs in Karnataka, Orissa, Noida, Gurgaon, Chattisgarh and Maharashtra.
Have you measured the impact of your programme on anyone community? Can you describe the whole process?
Take the tsunami reconstruction project in Nagapattinam that Pepsi funded.We got one crore from them. We went in with this idea that we would teach them how to make fish pickle and so on. But they wereso devastated that they did not want to be dependent on the sea. They have no fixed working hours. They go to work at dawn andcome back before the sun sets. They have very strict norms. One community does not talk to another. The boys don’t talk to the girls.They don’t go too far to work. We had to change the entire group. Reconstruction has changed the landscape of Nagapattinam. Weworked with 900 kids for nine months and several corporates including finance companies like ICICI, Citi, also telecom companieslike Reliance. We spent Rs 1 crore and Rs 2.3 crore came into the 900 families in nine months.
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