Rubanomics gamechangers

A Bangalore-based social enterprise has developed a unique VET model which has the potential to transform hundreds of millions of rural youth into employable living-wage earners A modestly appointed four-bedroom house converted into an office in Jayanagar, a green and pleasant suburb of Bangalore, is the head office of Head Held High Services Pvt. Ltd (H3S, estb.2012). A company with 80 employees, it has rolled out a unique ‘rubanomics’ model for bridging the rural-urban jobs divide by skilling unemployed and under-employed rural youth for white collar jobs (IT enabled services, BPOs, hospitality and retail trades) in urban and small-town India. If the model works, it has the potential to transform hundreds of millions of uneducated and under-educated rural youth into employable living-wage earners who could deliver India’s much proclaimed demographic dividend. Since this ingeniously conceptualised enterprise began training rural youth for employability in 2007 under the aegis of a trust named Foundation for Life, teaching them English, computer programs, life skills (interview capabilities, public speaking etc), H3S has established 15 training centres in Karnataka and one in neighbouring (former) Andhra Pradesh. Together these centres have trained over 1,000 illiterates and school graduates of whom 90 percent are already employed in 15 corporates, firms and business enterprises in Karnataka at an average monthly wage of Rs. 7,500. Tried and tested in its first learning centre in Koppal (pop.72,000), a tier-3 town in North Karnataka, the company’s RubanShakti vocational education and training system “extracts relevancy” from the traditional school syllabus; provides “transformational IT training” and uses “conversational pedagogies” of peer-to-peer learning in non-hierarchical environments to quickly develop the employability skills and confidence of unschooled and backward rural youth. “According to several research studies it is possible to make a completely English-illiterate youth 80 percent proficient in the language by familiarising him with 500 words. Under our sprint-style RubanShakti learning programmes, we teach our students 2,500 words using word recognition, phonetic reading, vowel combination pedagogies, and electronic games and gadgets. We are now confident we can make a completely English illiterate youth 95 percent English proficient within six months, as opposed to 12-16 years taken by the conventional school system. During our six-month intensive training programmes (Rs.9,000) we also make them computer literate and confident by teaching them transactional life skills. Our target is to train 2 million youth in ten years,” says Rajesh Bhat, an engineering graduate of Mysore University and former product manager of OnMobile Apps, Bangalore who co-founded H3S. Moved by the hapless plight of unemployed rural youth while visiting his native village Sirsi, in arid North Karnataka, Bhat (together with Sunil Savara) registered Foundation for Life in 2007 to train them to work in a BPO (business process outsourcing) unit they proposed to establish in Koppal. To raise funding for the proposed BPO, Bhat and Savara approached the Bangalore-based entrepreneurs network The Indus Entrepreneurs where they were referred to Madan Padaki who was at the time riding high on the success of MeritTrac Services Pvt. Ltd, a company he…