COAI-Centum Learning lends helping hand to 400 mn youth

NEW DELHI: The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) and Centum Learning, a corporate training company, have announced the pilot launch of a massive Outreach Program to mobilize under-priviledged youth for skill training.

Initially, the pilot project in Bihar would cover a subscriber base of over 1.5 crore people. Following this implementation, it will be rolled out nationwide by COAI member telcos to cover nearly 400 million subscribers after the formal launch of the scheme in July.

Keeping in mind that the biggest hurdles in skills training is reaching out, educating and motivating youth in the remote areas of the country, COAI and Centum Learning have come together with their Outreach program aims to address this challenge.

he initiative would help implement ‘Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana’ (PMKVY), a flagship outcome-based skill development scheme under the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, which plans to skill over 2.4 million people across the country.

Telecom providers would send text and voice-based awareness messages to the target audience. Interested youth can give a missed call to a toll-free number 1800 102 6000 and an interactive voice response pushed to the candidate would capture relevant details on an online application. Data analysis would then be done with callers being profiled on the basis of their age and location. Finally, interested candidates would be mapped to their nearest enrolment centres.

Rajan S Mathews, Director General, COAI, said: "The demographic dividend of India indicates that almost 57% of the country’s population is aged below 30 years; and almost 75% of that population is unskilled. Since early in the 11th Five Year Plan, the National Policy on Skill Development has set a target of 500 million people to be skilled by 2022. With such ambitious targets, the challenge of reaching out to the millions of people for mobilising them to learn professional skill sets needs to be overcome.

The Indian mobile telephony industry, which has grown phenomenally to become the 2nd largest market in the world with over 970 million connections, is perfectly situated to help enable this massive outreach programme, to reach out and contact the unskilled workforce to seek skill training under the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana. We look forward optimistically towards a grand success of this campaign.”

Sanjeev Duggal, CEO and Director, Centum Learning said, “Skilling today has rightly been recognized as an agent of Social Transformation for a country like India. We are delighted that Centum’s brainchild for mass mobilization elicited such enthusiastic response from Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman, Bharti Enterprises that he helped muster active and spontaneous support from all COAI members. I also believe skilling in India is akin to evangelizing and needed a disruption in the existing ecosystem to reach even ‘media-dark’ states in the country, where TV & print reach only 20% of the population. I am certain such collaboration will aggressively advance the National skills movement.”

The assembled dignitaries emphasized the significance of the Prime Minister’s vision of a Skilled India and how it can only be achieved if creative and disruptive ideas can be applied for outreach and mobilization. They also observed that it was critical for the industry and government to work together if these objectives were to be achieved. The Outreach Program has been hailed as a great example of what can be achieved through such innovation and collaboration.

Union Minister for Communications and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad; Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Minister of State, Skill Development & Entrepreneurship and Parliamentary Affairs; Rakesh Garg, DoT Secretary and Chairman – Telecom Commission; Sunil Arora, Secretary, Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship; Dilip Chenoy, MD & CEO, NSDC; Himanshu Kapania, MD, Idea Cellular were also present at the event.