Vocational training

It is this firm belief which prompted us to be part of Sarva siksha Abhiyan way back in 2004-05 while being partnering with government of Haryana in Sarvasiksha Abhiyan we ran more than 50 centers of vocational courses where skills like stitching, tailoring, cycle & motor bike repairing, Binding, plumbing . Spread in two districts of Haryana, Panipat and Hisar, these centres catered to more than 2500 boys and girls from the marginalized community.

Keeping this momentum forward we carried out vocational training for more than 6000 stakeholders from the marginalized community. Youngsters taking this training were suffering from double marginalization. First they were from the marginalized community and secondly were involved in unskilled labor from a very young age. After carrying out an intensive survey of more than 16000 shops and 2500 factories these kids were indentified and it took enormous amount of IPC to convince their parents that how arming them with a skill will go a long way in finding a way from the vicious cycle of poverty. As a part of National Child Labor programme we imparted training to these kids in different trades like IT, Electrician, TV mechanic, Mobile Mechanic, Motorcycle Mechanic, plumbing, beauty culture, tailoring, stitching etc.

In all these years we have always strived for ways and means to provide an opportunity to the marginalized section of society. It is this continuous effort of ours, which made Terse des Hommes (Germany) to extend an invitation to us to be their partner in Haryana. And now it is more than four years that we have been partnering with them to provide skill training to the most deprived section of the society, youngsters of poor migrant families. In the last four years more than 1500 kids have been trained in different trades and many of them have found gainful employment. The process of finding opportunities to work with the marginalized sections of society has brought us to Jharkhand as well. Working with Tata Power we have established more eleven groups of tribal people and have provided them with the training and know how of making ash brick. Not only that with the support of Tata Power we have also been able to provide them with fly ash Brick Making machine. Realizing the challenges of forward and backward linkages we ensured that they should get fly ash form Tata Power for the purpose of brick making and the brick produced would be utilized in the Swachcha Bharat Mission Gramin to construct toilets. Thus ensuring a readymade market for all the groups.

Emboldened with the success of this experiment we are now further engage in organizing women of east Sighbhumi into groups and training them with different skills which would provide them an opportunity to brake their dependence on moneylenders thus trapping them in the cycle of indebtedness forever. This is going to have multiple implications not for these women but for their family as well. An empowered woman would ensure that there is enough for the education of the children, specially the girl child, there is enough money to be spent on food and health. It will also ensure that these families would very rapidly jump the ladders of human development index.

We understand that we are here for a long haul because the level of marginalization is huge and it would take a herculean effort on part of all of us to change this scenario. But this state of affairs will be altered come what may.