French tech major Capgemini has embarked on a new talent stream development initiative to offer home-based career opportunities to educated women in small towns and villages across India.As part of this, Capgemini has launched Sakhi Drishtikon, an initiative to train and hire rural women graduates, post-graduates or diploma holders in technical subjects from economically weaker families and bring them into the mainstream workforce.Under this initiative, Capgemini will have 500 rural women from across rural India joining its workforce by the end of December while during calendar 2021, the company expects 15% of its fresh hiring to come from the new stream of rural talent.Radhika Ramesh, Executive Vice President — Global Delivery Center Head, Cloud Infrastructure Services, Capgemini India, said, “Sakhi Drishtikon is a timely initiative which takes advantage of new ways of living and working. There are a large number of qualified rural women who are not able to explore career opportunities in the cities. We are not just trying to give them jobs; instead, we want to carve out a long-term career for them.”Capgemini had roped in a bunch of NGOs to identify eligible candidates from the villages to be part of this programme. The chosen candidates are currently on a 4-5 month training and during the training, they are paid a salary of ₹3.8 lakh or more per annum or par with the fresh hires of Capgemini. A candidate should have 60% marks in academics and his/her family’s annual income should not exceed ₹1.8 lakh. All chosen candidates are offered free laptops and broadband connections at their homes.“We have 200 mentors being part of this programme. The training will equip the candidates for jobs in the areas of Security, Cloud and Data and eventually help them build a career path,” she added.Commenting on the possible extension of Sakhi Drishtikon, Ms. Ramesh said, “It is a fantastic workstream and it has the potential to become truly gender agnostic and gradually we will include all genders in it. In fact, we are piloting this model in India, which can be replicated in other geographies as well.’”
