Placements for dropouts

If you think of campus placements as rigid processes at brainy institutes, think again.

Campus placements are for IIT and IIM graduates, right? Wrong. Given the right training and linkages with industry, even school dropouts can be "placed".

Poverty and other problems "" a dead father, school too far away, brothers whose claim to education was considered far more important "" had forced Krishna Ghosh, Ranjita Naskar and Shivani Mondol to drop out of school. Common enough story.

Instead of sitting idle at home, the girls decided to learn stitching and tailoring at the nearby Carmel Convent. Laudable effort, but nothing new.

What was new, however, was what happened thereafter. What they learnt at the Carmel Convent was completely unlike anything that girls in similar vocational training schools all over the country were being taught.

The first five days were spent in taking the sewing machine apart, and putting it back again. Next the girls spent days simply working the leg-pedal and stitching in straight lines. It's only after they had achieved perfection in these areas were they allowed to move on to more complicated stuff.

A year-and-a-half later the Krishna, Ranjita and Shivani all have found jobs. They'll be working in Anamika Khanna's 10,000 sq ft factory, earning Rs 3,500-4,000 a month.

If life's looking up for these girls, they have the rather unique training they underwent at the Carmel Convent to thank for it. A training that was developed at the Don Bosco Self-Employment Research Institute (DBSERI) in Mirpara, Liluah in alliance with the Sparsh Foundation.

Says Suman Bhowmik of Sparsh, "Vocational training courses in India have traditionally taught trades like making candles or papad, which have no economic relevance. Hence their beneficiaries can naver transcend charity, making the entire exercise unsustainable."

The syllabus for the DBSERI course was developed with the help of NiFT faculty, students, designers, garment manufacturers and exporters. FabIndia contributed with reject fabric for the students, designs, patterns and so on.

For a while, the girls at the DBSERI even stitched FabIndia kurtas for the Kolkata store. In 2001, the course was affiliated to West Bengal State Council for Technical Education. The objective was to make such placements systematic.

As it stands, the girls are not perfect. According to Aniruddha Singh of Frontier Textiles who has employed 15 of them, "They have a reasonable level of technical expertise, but their skill needs sharpening. Also, productivity is a problem."

For Singh, the issue is not one of profit. "The garment industry employs the poor, the underpriviledged, the illiterate. Anything that provides them gainful employment is good for the economy as a whole." Those happy faces are proof of that.