Adgully Exclusive | How NIS Sparta is playing a vital role in Corp. leadership enhancement skills

Corporate houses are today, paying most if not all their attention to smaller markets. Rural markets have grown in terms of potential buyers and their presence cannot be missed as they make a mark on the charts. As more and more corporations take an active interest in the development of the rural markets, the rural markets are expanding and growing. NIS Sparta, a Reliance ADA Group company and Asia's leading training, education and learning solutions provider understand this and have tapped into it by undertaking various social schemes.

Line staff or Top management, everyone needs a bit of training, and brushing up on skills, but the concern we have today is how to train the youth in these markets and provide them with suitable career opportunities to make them independent individuals? NIS Sparta is spearheading the Swarnjayanti Rashtriya Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY), a special project by Ministry of Rural Development for rural employment.

Suprotim Chatterjee, Senior Manager ' Marketing of NIS Sparta speaking exclusively to Adgully said, "This project is aimed at Placement linked skill development of Rural youth below poverty line. The programme is designed to equip the unemployed rural youth from BPL households with marketable skills, with an objective to ensure a time bound training and capacity building programme for bringing a specific number of BPL families above the poverty line through placement ensuring regular wage employment."

This project aims to train rural BPL youth and place them in corporates with an average monthly salary of not less than six thousand. GoI and MoRD have a target of training and placing 18,000 youth in the first year of the scheme's implementation. The trained candidates will be placed in "A' grade companies across BPO, Telecom and FMCG sectors. Till date the candidates have been placed in reputed companies like Reliance Telecom, Tata Group of companies, Aditya Birla Group, Future Group, Pepsi foods, Pizza Hut, KFC, Shiv Shakti Fertilizers, Hindustan Unilever Ltd

NIS Sparta is one of the implementing agency in this project under the public private partnership domain to source ' train and place rural BPL youth and provide them with regular sustainable income.

"The tools used are basic awareness level for the Programme by doing various activities like Camps, Job mela, On Spot Registration to source candidates with the right profile. Unique ways like Career Opportunity Presentation and Transition to work Place are innovative methods to create impact in the Beneficiarys mind. Traditional methods like Poster, Banner and Pamphlet distribution also gives desired results for such initiatives," Chatterjee added.

Creating brand awareness is a critical component as far as rural marketing is concerned. This is because it brings credibility, trust and commitment to the project. "Rural population is suspicious on any new product or service and takes time to welcome such initiative. Since the program is time bound, it becomes essential to build and generate awareness for the Service Brand - Training & Employment coming with the support of IGNOU and MORD ' Government of INDIA ," said Chatterjee

He further explained, "In rural India credibility and trust are essential components for any product or service to sustain a long term plan in any market. Transparency, Commitment and the role of a facilitator and trainer will be some of the key brand objectives for such initiative. In short, the project is not only about free training and employment it's about- transforming lives."

However unfortunately brand awareness of such programmes are still low. Chatterjee attributes this to logistical issues. "It's difficult to penetrate deep in the rural areas. The main bottlenecks in such areas are distance, lack of local job opportunity and mindset. It's difficult as it is not only the students but their parents also need counseling for such changes," he explains.

To carry forward a project like this is no easy task. Chatterjee explains the numerous challenges the company had to face and overcome.

Various problems like changing the employers mindset ' providing the rural youth equal opportunity and to ensure that training centres are mobile and created as per the mandate of the employer and also to ensure it is near to the rural youth club, centres or colleges were discussed and overcome by the company.

"We faced challenges like semirural or urban transformation for the candidate and migration from rural base to urban area in search of better opportunity. Workplace ethics and manners as per predefined rules-transformation process had to be undergone. Also we had to generate awareness to the program and its benefits. Influencing the key influencers like Principals, Doctors, Panchayats to support such cause for the benefit of people was another obstacle we had to overcome," explained Chatterjee.

Connecting with the rural market through such initiatives is crucial and it helps to create a better image of the brand. This also ensures a better brand connectivity and recall. | By Janees Antoo [janees(at)adgully.com]