Pandemic experience helps tech major Capgemini to start hiring rural women in India

Learnings from the coronavirus pandemic have led French IT major Capgemini to start hiring qualified women from rural areas, who are unable to pursue career because of an inability to relocate, as software engineers, a senior official said on Wednesday.

The company is targeting to hire 500 such women by December and has already initiated the project with 100 women from southern states who are being trained currently. A woman will get hired as a trainee and earn at par with peers in the company, which is at least Rs 3.5 lakh a year.

Following the announcement of a nationwide lockdown in late-March, the entire service delivery model of the over USD 180-billion Indian IT industry had to be reworked as staff started working from home. Capgemini employs over 1 lakh people in India.

"The pandemic showed us that work can be handled seamlessly from anywhere in the country because of telecom infrastructure and that is where we decided to launch the project to hire such qualified women who have been forced by circumstances not to pursue a career," Radhika Ramesh, global delivery centre head for CIS India, Capgemini, told PTI.

The women hired through the project named 'Sakhi Drishtikon' will work on projects involving various team members in the cloud and infrastructure services (CIS) business to start with and also work on cybersecurity front, she said.

The work they will be handling will not be akin to business process outsourcing (BPO) services, she added.

The women will be qualified graduates or postgraduates or possess a diploma in a specialised subject, she said.

Ramesh added that they will be put through more rigorous training modules before absorbed into projects and will also have experienced engineers as mentors.

She said that because of a slew of commitments, rural women are unable to pursue career like their urban area counterparts.

The first batch of 100 predominantly has those who had to go back to native place after education or ones who have an experience of up to a year, Ramesh added.

The company has roped in non-government organisations as partners to spot such women across the country, she said.