Infosys is striving to bridge the rural-urban divide

IT bellwether Infosys has been trying to bridge the rural-urban divide by bringing into its fold as many recruits from non-urban areas as possible. This year, Infosys CEO Krish Gopalakrishnan said, as much as 40% of the company’s new employees are from rural areas.

“We are pleasantly surprised to find that 40% of the new employees of Infosys Technologies Limited are from non-urban areas,” Gopalakrishnan said at a function recently. He added that an informal survey revealed that either one or both parents of a majority of these recruits had not completed the Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC) course.

Hailing their entry into the company as a “quiet transformation”, Gopalakrishnan said the trend was helping Infy bring about a change in their lives, and “creating more middle class”, and added that much more had to be done to bridge the rural-urban divide. To achieve this, the company has started some initiatives to bring more trained and skilled personnel from non-urban areas.

“Our target is to bridge the rural-urban divide and bring in more trained and skilled people from rural areas as our workforce, for which we are imparting special training to rural educated youths. We strongly believe that given an opportunity, rural youth can be a big asset for the company,” said a senior human resource official of Infosys.

One such initiative is the Infosys Campus Connect Program. Infy has tied up with over 425 engineering colleges to enhance the quality of IT talent pool. Of this, more than 60% of the institutions are located in tier 2 and 3 cities of India. 

“The Infosys Campus Connect is an industry-academia partnership programme where Infosys and engineering colleges partner to enhance the pool of highly capable talent for future growth requirements in the IT industry. It has been designed to offer benefits to all stakeholders in the engineering education supply-chain such as students, faculty members, college managements and policy makers,” the HR official said.

As part of the campus connect programme, Infosys imparts training to students through various initiatives like the Infosys Foundation Program, technical training, soft skills training, roadshows, faculty enablement programmes, industrial visits, sabbaticals for faculty, programming and other contest series, including webinars by specialists and much more.

“The main objective is to develop global IT professionals with technical, soft skills, process rigour and English language fluency, to enhance engineering college faculty leadership, and also influence higher education policies to make engineering education relevant, application oriented and best-in-class,” the official said.

The initiative is expected to help IT companies gain access to a larger talent pool, with high technical knowledge at the entry level itself. This would not only help increase placements at colleges, but would also provide academic faculty with industry exposure.