Only training can help, feels India Inc

New Delhi: FMCG major Hindustan Lever will soon start recruiting 100 apprentices every year exclusively from the scheduled caste (SC), scheduled tribes (ST) and other backward castes (OBC). Fifty will be trained in skills relating to manufacturing and the other 50 in the sales, merchandising and distribution operations.

The company, a spokesperson says, in any case, prefers to recruit from the disadvantaged groups, selecting people from local communities where it has operations.

Software major Infosys Technologies is already off the block; its subsidiary Progeon has trained about 60 SC/ST and OBC youth from North Karnataka and offered jobs to 50.

The Apeejay Stya Education Research Programme is conducting a survey among human resource managers asking them what skills they find lacking among recruits.

Industry and government will then need to work together to train people to be employable, says Sushma Berlia, president of the Apeejay Stya group.
It is such initiatives, not quotas, that will genuinely help the backward social groups, industry insists.

Incentives - tax breaks, preference in government procurement for companies with a certain percentage of backward classes on their rolls - don’t find favour across industry.
“This is not a long term answer. You can’t give incentives forever,” points out Berlia.
“There is recognition in industry of the issues confronting the disadvantaged sections. We are not in denial,” says N Srinivasan of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

Few, however, deny that the issue of affirmative action is something industry has been grappling with only since 2004, when the UPA government’s Common Minimum Programme first mentioned it.

“It was never on our radar earlier,” admits a senior official of a chamber. “But it wasn’t because we were insensitive. It was never an issue because we never discriminated on non-professional criteria,” he hastens to add.

After initial knee-jerk and rash reactions, 21 industrialists signed a more sober statement.

“We recognise that in a liberalised and decontrolled economy, where the government has a reduced role in the economy, the benefits of reservations in government and public sector undertakings need to be complemented by affirmative action by industry.” It went on to add “the need is not just to provide jobs but also incubate the emergence of a robust entrepreneurial class of youth from the SCs and STs”.

That’s the point Ficci secretary general Amit Mitra keeps making, quoting figures from the Economic Census to point out that 45% of enterprises in the country are owned by the SCs/STs/OBCs. Of this only 11% are owned by the SC/ST group.

“There has been a massive failure of governance on the education and training front and we are willing to work with the government to address that,” asserts Mitra.

Training in skills, entrepreneurship development and partnering with the government in various levels of education is, therefore, the preferred route to affirmative action.

In fact, industry takes pains to point out that that is something companies have already been doing, either through developing ancillaries and suppliers or through their various social responsibility initiatives.

ITC’s “social forestry programme”, which started in 2001-02, for example, helps tribals in the Khammam district of Andhra Pradesh convert unproductive lands into viable pulp-wood plantations, with a guaranteed buyback from ITC’s aperboards mill.

Some 6,078 tribal households in 224 villages have benefited. In Tripura, ITC has trained tribal women in making agarbatis and then markets them under the brand name “Mangaldeep”.

Delhi-based Bharti group has announced a Rs 200-crore nationwide primary education project for under-privileged children under the auspices of the Bharti Foundation set up in 2000.

The foundation is already helping construct school rooms, in partnership with the Xavier Institute of Social Sciences, in six village schools in the tribal-dominated Ranchi district of Jharkhand. There are numerous similar examples across India Inc.

Member companies of both Ficci and CII have adopted Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and are involved in their management (though the experience hasn’t been too happy or productive).

Both chambers are encouraging members to take up new initiatives - taking youth from the backward classes as apprentices and preparing them for jobs, not necessarily in that company, and entrepreneurship.

But what if the government tries pushing some kind of job quotas on the private sector?

That, industry is unanimous, will be totally unacceptable. A compromise solution could be that companies start reporting, like American firms, the number of employees from the backward classes in their annual reports. “That might provide some peer pressure, which might be more effective,” agrees Subodh Bhargava, non-executive chairman of VSNL.

Will this be acceptable? That’s not clear but the only bright spot in the currently charged atmosphere is Bhargava and Ashok Bharti of NACDOR both appealing for a platform for cool and intelligent discussion.

(With inputs from Satish John and Madhumita Mookerji)