News

Volume 8 Issue 9 - December 01, 2011

Joint effort by Wadhwani Foundation and TeamLease – I.I.J.T. to empower persons with disabilities

D.N.I.S. News Network, India: The Indian subsidiary of the Wadhwani Foundation and TeamLease, Indian Institute of Job Training (I.I.J.T.), recently announced an initiative to train and recruit around 2000 persons with disabilities across the country, in order to influence the employability quotient of people with disabilities in mainstream jobs of the organised sector. TeamLease – I.I.J.T. plans to train 500 youth between the age group of 18 to 30 in the next one year and scale it up to 2000 in the following year. This initiative will kick start on World Disability Day and will be meant exclusively for people with orthopaedic disabilities. They would gradually want to move to other disabilities such as hearing and speech impairment.

The move is being supported by the Wadhwani Foundation through one of their key initiatives, ‘Opportunity Network for the Disabled’. The course fee will be Rs. 10,000 and Wadhwani Foundation will fund half of the interested candidate’s fees to undertake skill development training and courses across the 120 I.I.J.T. centres in the country. The rest will have to be borne by the student.

A curriculum has been specially designed by I.I.J.T. to help the candidates find jobs in the areas of customer relations. The course curriculum is structured in a way that the candidates are trained to match the job profiles and deliver organisation oriented output. Besides training the students with disabilities, I.I.J.T. is committed to providing almost assured placement.

Speaking on this campaign, Ajay Kela, President and C.E.O. of Wadhwani Foundation said “India has a very unique talent pool of an estimated two to three million educated persons with disabilities. Corporate India could derive better business value in terms of higher productivity, reduced attrition and lowered retraining costs by employing this proven and tenacious, but generally ignored talent pool.”