Coimbatore, TamilNadu :

S Dhanushya, 18, thought all was lost when she looked up at a board displaying her class 12 results. She had failed in English and had scored low marks in her other main subjects too.

Though she was ashamed to face the world, her family needed an income from her to pull through. “My carpenter father was the only earning member and most of what he earned went towards paying for my younger sister’s education. My family was always struggling to make ends meet,” she says. “So I took up a job at a gold covering unit which paid me around Rs1,500 per month for four hours of work daily,” says Dhanushya. She had just sat for the supplementary exams which were held in the end of June last year. “I was considered a failure and felt ashamed,” she said.

That was when her mother saw an advertisement in the newspaper about an NGO, Unnati, which helps school dropouts and unemployed people get jobs. “The girl was unfocussed and low on confidence,” says Padmapriya Muthusamy, relationship manager at Unnati. “We first helped her speak English with confidence and then focused on fluency,” she says. English is the only language spoken in Unnati centres as a rule. “Our life skills and values class gave her a positive approach to life,” says Padmapriya. The NGO puts such students through a 70-day course which helps improve their English speaking skills, computer operating and type-writing skills among other things.

Seventy days later, Dhanushya got placed in Taj Vivanta’s laundry department and earns Rs7,500 a month. “It was like being given another chance at life,” she says. “I was not interested in academics, but now I want to pursue a correspondence course to move further up in my job,” she says.

Unnati, which launched in Coimbatore a year ago, focuses on people below the poverty line, training and helping them get jobs in corporate companies. They have trained and placed 40 students so far.

It is now a known fact that most under-graduate degrees do not prepare students for the industry. This is just one of the many programs conducted to make under-graduates and school drop-outs job ready. “We realized that a large sector of the automobile, electrical appliance, hospitality, food and hospital industry is in desperate need of manpower in the blue collar sections who are literate, communicative and have some basic skills,” said the spokesperson for Tech Mahindra’s SMART programme. “We try to bridge the gap between what our education system offers and what the industry actually needs by getting them job ready,” he added. This CSR initiative launched by Tech Mahindra is based in Chennai and the course is free of cost.

In a few cities, many of the local bodies like Chennai Corporation and Pune Municipal Corporation have launched vocational training programs to serve the local body-run school’s failures and drop outs. “We have programs that train students for free in baking, computers, fashion designing and electronics. We also have a 100% placement rate,” said J Venkatesh, former education commissioner, Chennai Corporation.

source:http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Coimbatore / TNN / April 01st, 2014