Mumbai: Department for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities (DEPwD) [Ministry of Social justice & Empowerment (MSJE)] and Wadhwani Foundation’s Skills Development Network Trust announced a strategic partnership with a vision to provide training and employment of Persons with Disabilities (PwDs). Lov Verma, Secretary, DEPwD and Ajay Mohan Goel, Trustee, SDN Trust signed the MOU.

The partnership aims at using technology to create scalability for training and employment of 500,000 PwDs in three years, with overall target of 25,00,000 by year 2022. To achieve this goal, Skills Development Network Trust has committed to co-invest an amount of between Rs. 12 Crores to Rs. 60 Crores during the next four years, by leveraging the Government funding in the ratio of 1:10.

Speaking on this strategic partnership, Dr. Ajay Kela President & CEO, Wadhwani Foundation said, “Prevalent modus operandi of disability management focused around welfare, reservations, concessions, subsidies and other short-term practices have clearly failed to deliver results. This strategic partnership between Department for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities (DEPwD) and Wadhwani Foundation will accelerate development and employment efforts of this unique talent pool of 3-4 million educated disabled in India. This segment of society reflects an enormous ‘can-do’ attitude, and through Government and Foundation support coupled with proper training we hope to mainstream the disabled into corporate jobs.

Key focus areas of this collaboration will include program management and support for training and employment of 500,000 PwDs over 3 years through the Government’s National Action Plan for Skill Training of Persons with Disabilities, creation of IT-enabled interactive content for PwD training to meet the scale requirement, assisting public companies to meet their requirement of hiring PwD’s for 3% of their staff. Under this MoU, Wadhwani Foundation will also set up Wadhwani Chair at one or two National Institutes for PWD to providing research and technology expertise for rapid development of innovative new assistive devices for PwDs apart from their training and development.

Expressing happiness at signing this MoU, Shri Mukesh Jain, Joint Secretary, Department for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities (DEPwD) said, “India needs to integrate its sizable disabled population into society. This can only happen if we empower Persons with Disabilities (PwDs) economically and the best way to do so is to skill and train them for better job opportunities. Through this MoU, Wadhwani Foundation’s SDN trust will help the government in bringing multi-dimensional technology enabled e-content solutions like massive open online courses (MOOCs) to meet PwD related skilling objectives. Also, the Wadhwani Chair at one or two National Institutes for PwD will aid in rapid development of innovative new assistive devices enabling PwDs to perform tasks that they were formerly unable to accomplish.

”Wadhwani Foundation’s Opportunity Network for Disabled (OND) has been propelling widespread change with the mission of mainstreaming the educated disabled in corporate India. The Foundation has been at the forefront of supporting training and placement of disabled individuals into mid-skill entry level jobs . OND enables educated PwD youth who are provided training in identified skill areas to be placed against regular job openings in mainstream organizations.

Source : Lokesh Shastri