Mahindra & Mahindra on Friday said it will start its fifth Mahindra Pride School (MPS) in Srinagar by October 8 as part of its strategy to train and create a pool of one million employable youth by 2022.
“MPS Srinagar will commence its first batch with the specific objective of helping the youth of Jammu and Kashmir channelise their energies productively,” the company said in a statement.
The other MPS are located in Pune, Patna and Chandigarh, graduating 600 students annually each, besides 800 students from Chennai, it added.
“The Group has set up these schools with the aim of helping to mainstream socially and economically disadvantaged youth through vocational education and training. The aim is to make them employable in the organised private sector with over 85 per cent of them coming from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes,” the statement said.
The MPS graduates get specialised training in a range of fields, including retail, hospitality and house-keeping, BPO and KPO, it added.
M&M President (Group HR and Aftermarket Sector), Rajeev Dubey, said, “The Mahindra Group recognises that there is a larger need to appropriately skill massive numbers of unemployed Indian youth for the burgeoning service sector, where there is a huge demand for a skilled job-ready workforce at the entry level.”
The Mahindra Partners’ investment division is actively exploring options to significantly scale up the number of trained youth by evaluating further expansion of the Pride School network, he added.
The first MPS was set up in March 2007 in Pune that currently has 4,503 alumni.
The MPS is fully funded by the KC Mahindra Education Trust with the investment per student ranging from Rs 18,000 to Rs 20,000.
Some of the leading entities that regularly employ MPS alumni across the country include Cafe Coffee Day, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Hotel Le Meridien, JW Marriott Group, TCS, Dell Computers, Tanishq, Fariyas Resort, Hotel Oakwood Residency, Sodexho, Mphasis, Syntel, WNS, Bharti AXA and Tata Business Support Services, the statement said.