AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: Sunil Bharti Mittal
New Delhi: Bharti Enterprises is set to train and employ engineers from the SC/ST bracket on preferential basis, in the process becoming the second big player embracing a voluntary affirmative action plan.
The social justice ministry and Bharti Enterprises are joining hands in an endeavour that was set rolling by Infosys last year. The IT giant had trained 88 engineers at its Bangalore premises of which 79 have found work in top industrial houses. The social justice ministry has sent a list of 170 SC/ST unemployed engineers to Bharti after its CEO Sunil Bharti Mittal wrote that his business house be given names of persons who could be trained for absorption.
The ministry has sought to know the locations of training centres, as Bharti has establishments across the states and apprenticeship could be in multiple regional centres according to the domicile of candidates.
Training SC/ST professionals seems to be emerging as a new way for corporates to prove their credentials with regard to marginalised sections after they successfully resisted demands for private sector quota from champions of Dalit rights. However, the debate on the primacy of ‘‘merit’’ in the private sector provoked questions from social justice ministry and activists who felt that the private sector was tilted against SC/STs.
Corporates have argued on the ‘‘employability’’ quotient of engineering, management and other SC/ST professionals. It has been said that their non-English background saddles them with handicaps from being accepted in the private sector, which leans towards the English-speaking, urbane sections with a degree of comfort in corporate functioning.
Infosys kicked off the programme, in partnership with the social justice ministry, to train the engineers whose names were given by the latter. While around Rs 1 crore was spent on training, around Rs 36 lakh was the estimated cost of boarding and lodging for the candidates. Corporates feel such programmes would go some distance in neutralising the hostility against them in the pro-poor sections.
Bharti has taken a cue from the Infosys experiment. In the wake of the success of its six-month training programme and the goodwill generated for the company, the IT giant has expressed a desire to devise ways to institutionalise it. The company has decided to spread the training for 2007-08 to five new places, including Bhubaneswar and Pune.
Source: Time of India
New Delhi: Bharti Enterprises is set to train and employ engineers from the SC/ST bracket on preferential basis, in the process becoming the second big player embracing a voluntary affirmative action plan.
The social justice ministry and Bharti Enterprises are joining hands in an endeavour that was set rolling by Infosys last year. The IT giant had trained 88 engineers at its Bangalore premises of which 79 have found work in top industrial houses. The social justice ministry has sent a list of 170 SC/ST unemployed engineers to Bharti after its CEO Sunil Bharti Mittal wrote that his business house be given names of persons who could be trained for absorption.
The ministry has sought to know the locations of training centres, as Bharti has establishments across the states and apprenticeship could be in multiple regional centres according to the domicile of candidates.
Training SC/ST professionals seems to be emerging as a new way for corporates to prove their credentials with regard to marginalised sections after they successfully resisted demands for private sector quota from champions of Dalit rights. However, the debate on the primacy of ‘‘merit’’ in the private sector provoked questions from social justice ministry and activists who felt that the private sector was tilted against SC/STs.
Corporates have argued on the ‘‘employability’’ quotient of engineering, management and other SC/ST professionals. It has been said that their non-English background saddles them with handicaps from being accepted in the private sector, which leans towards the English-speaking, urbane sections with a degree of comfort in corporate functioning.
Infosys kicked off the programme, in partnership with the social justice ministry, to train the engineers whose names were given by the latter. While around Rs 1 crore was spent on training, around Rs 36 lakh was the estimated cost of boarding and lodging for the candidates. Corporates feel such programmes would go some distance in neutralising the hostility against them in the pro-poor sections.
Bharti has taken a cue from the Infosys experiment. In the wake of the success of its six-month training programme and the goodwill generated for the company, the IT giant has expressed a desire to devise ways to institutionalise it. The company has decided to spread the training for 2007-08 to five new places, including Bhubaneswar and Pune.
Source: Time of India
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