Bharti Enterprises on noble cause, set to train SC/ST Engineers

A noble move by Bharti Enterprises has made Dalits happy. Bharti is set to train and employ engineers from the SC/ST bracket on preferential basis, in the process becoming the second big player after Infosys in embracing a voluntary affirmative action plan.

This is a goodwill voluntary move by a big company though most private firms have successfully resisted demands for private sector quota.

The Social Justice ministry and Bharti Enterprises are joining hands for this endeavor. Engineers from these bracket will be trained and employed finally.

Last year, India’s IT giant Infosys had trained 88 engineers at its Bangalore premises of which 79 have found work in top industrial houses. This time on the request of Bharti CEO Sunil Bharti Mittal who wrote to the social justice ministry to sent a list of engineers who could be trained for absorption, the ministry has sent a list of 170 SC/ST who will be short listed soon for the training.

The ministry has sought to know the locations of training centers, 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 marginalized 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 program, 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 programs would go some distance in neutralizing 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 program and the goodwill generated for the company, the IT giant has expressed a desire to devise ways to institutionalize it. The company has decided to spread the training for 2007–08 to five new places, including Bhubaneswar and Pune.