National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC) and India@75 announced UNNATI and Tamul Plates Marketing Pvt. Ltd as the winners of the third Power to Empower 2013 Challenge.
March 19, 2014 | Delhi, India: National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC) and India@75 have announced Ramesh Swamy of UNNATI and Arindam Dasgupta of Tamul Plates Marketing Pvt. Ltd. as the winners of the Power to Empower 2013 Challenge (P2E 2013).
Supported by the Muthoot Pappachan Foundation, the CSR arm of the Muthoot Pappachan Group, the P2E 2013 Challenge was launched in October 2013 with the aim of identifying, selecting and rewarding the best solutions bridging the gap between the supply and demand of skilled labour in India.
This year, Power to Empower received a record 1,004 applications from over 150 cities across India and was managed by Ennovent and TiE Delhi-NCR. These applications were accepted as part of two distinct categories – Idea and Operations. P2E 2013 received 724 Idea and 280 Operations applications with the highest number of entries coming from New Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune respectively.
The winning Idea submitted by Guwahati based Tamul Plates Marketing focuses on generating rural livelihoods by producing and marketing biodegradable dinnerware. They also provide technical support and financial linkages to rural areca nut – commonly referred to as betel nut – producers. In contrast, the winning application within the Operations category, UNNATI is a Bangalore based organisation that runs a 70-day vocational training program for economically backward youth with an assured job at the end of the training period.
In addition to the winners, the finalists for the Idea category were Rachel Bennett, Bhavani B, Dwayne Dias and Dr. Shelley Batra. Their ideas for skill development ranged from projects such as Saarthi, which aims at creating teacher entrepreneurs to OpASHA, which hires local slum residents as community health-workers.
Within the Operations category, Guwahati based Sahayika and Gurgaon based INDHA received the second and third place respectively with TARA Livelihood Academy and GMR Varalakshmi Foundation being the other two finalists. While Sahayika is a skills initiative to assure respect and fair wages to home based caregivers, INDHA was started by Literacy India and provides women with vocational training in sewing, block printing, papermaking and more to empower underprivileged women and children.
The finalists and winners were selected after multiple rounds of expert evaluation by an esteemed jury panel consisting of Mr. S Ramadorai, Chairman NSDC, Mr. Rajan Navani, Chairman India@75, Mr. Pramod Bhasin, Vice Chairman, Genpact & Chairman, The Skills Academy and Mr. Thomas Muthoot, Executive Director Muthoot Fincorp Ltd amongst others.
At the ceremony held in Delhi to announce the winners, Mr. S Ramadorai, Chairman, NSDC, said, “My heartiest congratulations to all the winners, finalists and the participants. P2E as an initiative was designed to sensitize and encourage entrepreneurship in the skills space. Reaching out to grass-root entrepreneurs and enabling them to scale up their businesses is a step towards nation building. I hope through this effort we develop a system that not only encourages the concept of entrepreneurship, but actually works towards the achievement of creating a skilled workforce of 500 million by 2022.”
As part of the prizes for P2E 2013, UNNATI and Tamul Plates Marketing will receive INR 1.5 lakh and 3.5 lakh cash respectively by the Muthoot Pappachan Foundation, the CSR arm of the Muthoot Pappachan Group. Upon rewarding the prizes, Mr. Thomas Muthoot, Executive Director Muthoot Fincorp Ltd said, “The finalists did a great job in clearly explaining their solutions for enhancing the skills ecosystem in India. P2E 2013 has been a real eye opener, and a great initiative that we would like to be part of next year as well.”
Both winners will also receive access to the high profile capacity building Empretec program, an initiative of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development as well as access to the iDiya program at ISB Hyderabad.
In addition to the above, the winners and finalists in each category will receive access to the Sankalp Unconvention Summit 2014 and to the Diffusion workshop by ISB, networking opportunities and national visibility.
Further talking about the Power to Empower 2013 Challenge, Mr. Rajan Navani, Chairman, National Committee, India@75, said, “The Power to Empower 2013 Challenge aspires to encourage young and budding entrepreneurs with innovative ideas and scalable business models working in the skills eco-system, so that they can contribute and decrease the demand – supply gap in the entry level workforce across sectors.
According to “Education To Employment: Designing a system that works” by McKinsey & Company, around 53 per cent of employers in India say that skills deficiency is one of the key reasons for entry-level vacancies. At present, of the 15 million individuals who enter the work force, only 3 per cent undergo any form of vocational training due to limited access to such training opportunities in a fast growing economy. As a result, a majority of India’s population cannot realize the employment opportunities necessary to improve their income leading to a more prosperous life.
Ennovent managed P2E 2013 on behalf of NSDC and India@75. In addition, TiE Delhi-NCR served as a knowledge and delivery partner for the Challenge and National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) as the key outreach partner.
About National Skill Development Corporation
The National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) is a one of its kind, Public Private Partnership in India. It aims to promote skill development by catalyzing creation of large, quality, for-profit vocational institutions. It provides funding to build scalable, for-profit vocational training initiatives. Its mandate is also to enable support systems such as quality assurance, information systems and train the trainer academies either directly or through partnerships. Its objective is to contribute significantly (about 30 per cent) to the overall target of skilling/up skilling 500 million people in India by 2022.
About India@75
India@75 is a grassroots initiative aimed at realizing the dream of an inclusive, sustainable and developed India by the year 2022, when India completes 75 years of Independence. It is a universal vision for India shared by Indians from all geographies and all walks of life. The initiative is incubated and supported by the Confederation Indian Industry (CII).
About Ennovent
Ennovent is an innovation accelerator. We provide services to accelerate for-profit innovations for sustainability in low-income markets in developing countries. We specialise in helping clients discover enterprises with novel solutions, develop business models to start-up enterprises, provide finance by facilitating early-stage investments and grow operations to scale profit and impact. Since 2008, Ennovent has worked with over 4,800 Network members, 15 Circle members and 10 Solution clients to accelerate over 80 innovations in 10 countries.
About TiE Delhi-NCR
The Delhi Chapter is among the largest and most vibrant across the vast TiE network. In the last 12 years, of its existence it has emerged as the forum of choice for startups, serial entrepreneurs, VC and angel investors, policy makers and academia. At the heart of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, TiE Delhi plays the role of an ecosystem builder by bringing in multiple stakeholders and values to align with the common goal to foster entrepreneurship. It boasts of an active membership of 1500 members in the Delhi-NCR region and conducts 60+ events in a year.
About Muthoot Pappachan Group and Muthoot Pappachan Foundation
Muthoot Pappachan Group is a diversified corporate conglomerate with presence across various businesses. In financial services, it offers a range of products & services including gold loan, auto loan, affordable housing finance & microfinance through a wide network of over 3600 branches. Muthoot Pappachan Foundation (MPF), the CSR arm of the Muthoot Pappachan Group, facilitates the CSR activities for the entire Group Companies. Its objective is to build a framework of corporate social responsibility with a philanthropic approach in line with business unit objectives. The CSR initiatives are focussed on the areas of Health, Education, Environment and Livelihood (HEEL).
Media Contact:
Perzen Patel, Manager – Marketing, Ennovent
Email: perzen.patel@ennovent.com
