From our Staff Correspondent
DIBRUGARH, March 10: Project Swabalamban is a CSR project of Oil India Ltd. (OIL) under which it is conducting various projects and schemes for welfare of society. Indian Institute of Entrepreneurship (IIE) is the implementing agency of all the skill development programmes under Project Swabalamban.
For the past 12 months it has sponsored 420 students for undergoing Skill Development in Hospitality Magement through IIE Guwahati, an organization of the Ministry of MSME, Government of India. Pragati Edutech Pvt. Ltd. (Pragati), a training institute promoted and maged by local entrepreneurs, has been training and providing jobs to these local youths in marquee hotel properties across India. In order to generate greater awareness about the programme and also career opportunities in the hospitality industry among the local community, a series of awareness programmes have been organized at Kakopathar, Pengeri and Moran from March 9 to March 11.
The programmes have been organized with full participation of local communities who have
been actively supporting the project for the past 12 months apart from the current and past students who underwent the training. The unique achievements of this project implemented by Pragati has been its ability to provide employment to every candidate in prestigious hotel properties with long term career prospects and further - to eble them to continue in their respective jobs for nearly a year.
Tuesday’s programmes at Pengeri saw the enthusiastic participation of a number of current students including a few who are waiting to join the Taj group and ITC group of hotels. Also heartening was to hear the exciting transformation experienced by six students as representatives of nearly 300 past students who have been working at various prestigious hotels across India for a period ranging from 3-11 months. These students took short leave and travelled from as far as Pune, Cheni, Mumbai, Jaipur and Vadodara to take part in the function – to express their gratitude to OIL and IIE.
Speaking on the sidelines, Santanu Choudhury promoter of Pragati – who is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and IIM Ahmedabad, highlighted the efforts that went into seamlessly interstice the four processes of student mobilization, training, placement and post placement counseling as the key to the enormous success of the hospitality project. He exuded confidence that with increasing number of students joining jobs and building their long term career there, Project Swabalamban would truly be able to achieve the desired social impact.
Dr. Sripar B Baruah Head Industrial Extension, who is in charge of the project at IIE, expressed her satisfaction at the outcome of the hospitality project. IIE is now tying up with other PSU organizations to provide implementation support to their CSR projects through CSR Hub created at IIE Guwahati.