Inclusive Growth and Role of NIIT Foundation

Back in 2006, NIIT started a group called “Affirmative Action”.  The word originated from the perceived need of building skills in SC and ST students so that they can take up jobs in the organised sector, based on their merit rather than on reservation.  That was also a call of the Government and Corporates and was visible in manifestos released by organisations such as CII and FICCI.

Taking up the responsibility of driving Affirmative Action at NIIT, I started exploring what we could do in the area.  We began with very little clarity but a lot of passion on what we wanted to do.  We sought to distil out our target audience, our charter and our sustenance model.  NIIT has globally established competence in Education Delivery, Content Development and Technology for education and training for students across 40 countries worldwide. We decided to start by finding out how best our core competencies could be leveraged to impact larger India. 

This meant visiting rural India, talking to people already passionately engaged in similar development work and experimenting with ideas – old and new.  We found that everyone, without exception, was happy with the idea that NIIT would be doing something in the social space.  However, almost everyone had a different view of what should be done and how it should be done.  And that’s precisely what made defining NIIT Foundation that much more challenging and interesting.

The numbers were stark – less than 20% of India (primarily urban) was creating more than 80% of the GDP - and the facts were disturbing – rural to urban ratio had moved from 80:20 to 73:27 in the last 20 or so years. However, the population growth in urban areas was primarily in India’s slums!  The visits to our country’s interiors revealed that the ‘divides’ in their various forms were the real hindrances to India’s inclusive growth.  Casteism led to segregation of population in terms of access to amenities and gender bias led to differentiation in education for girls.  Financial and technical divides led to ignorance and inappropriate choices in education and, hence, frustration and downward spiral for the youth of India.

 Another interesting phenomena was that civil service organizations were at work almost everywhere we went, and some had been in existence for a long time in some of the areas.  However, the impact was not visible though each organization had great case studies.  These were lessons for us on scale, impact and sustainability of not-for-profit organizations.

Through the last five years of exploring, experimenting, running operations directly in slums and small towns as well as working with other non-profit organizations – I believe we are now more focused and clearer on what we want to do and how we are to do it.  We have a better picture about the scale of the operations and we have a direction for sustainability.  We are an enabling organization, building training content, enabling on-ground NGOs, giving wings to social efforts of other corporates, and providing means for individuals to contribute to social development meaningfully.  Our projects are now firmly in place and we hope to start reaping the benefits of scale of reach and impact in the very near future. 

This newsletter gives you a window into what we are doing and how we are doing it.  Through this newsletter, we hope to connect with more and more people and corporates and we are looking forward to views, critical inputs and support to take this mission forward.

Best wishes

Neeraj Agarwal