The Challenge...my first large scale social initiative at Rajur, Dist Ahmednagar

At Rajur..150+ Km from Pune, a group of 4000+ tribal and youth waiting for an opportunity of life. As i thought when i went to Rajur for the first time, it was with an idea that we would do a career development program in a beautiful tribal school.But later realised its not about career development at all. Building Careers is just far from our imagination and its about un employable youth. The problem of un-employability is far deeper than what it looks like from outside.

The tribal and the local kids learn in the local Ashram School, highly subsidised, fully residential. After the tenth grade they are supposed to leave a protected Ashram school to fetch higher education for themselves. Now it really a test of their sustainability.. on one side the pressure to earn their living and the other to study. Invariably each one of them lands into a college to do Arts, after few days unable to pay up 50% drop out. and lack of confidence and opportunity leaves them with menial job or no jobs...

Decided to do some thing...something that would make an impact. Went back to Pune, worked on a program and returned with a unique program to develop these young people.

The belief was they had enough potential...they had enough intelligence, what they did not have is confidence.. decided to test my beliefs..

We conducted the culture fair ravens intelligence test on the pilot batch of 140 students and to our surprise we found 24 students above the 75 percentile.

38 between 60 to 75 percentile. and the rest below 60 percentile. Said need to work on them, and then the pilot batch was launched. We said its the SEVEN steps to being employable...

ITS NOT THAT THE SHORTAGE OF OPPORTUNITIES.. ITS THE BIG IRON SCREEN OF THE JOB MARKET THAT DEMANDS SOFT SKILLS MORE THAN THE ACADEMIC AND PROCESS SKILLS TO GET EMPLOYED...We are focusing on this challenge..and hence the design of the program.

Anand Desai