Kolkata-based Anudip Foundation has raised $650,000 a grant from Omidyar Network. The foundation, which provides jobs skills training and placement services to impoverished youth in rural and semi-urban areas, will use the four-year grant to scale up its skills training and entrepreneur development operations in eastern India, said a press release.
The foundation started its work in 2006 and offers three kinds of services to meet its goals:
- It runs a chain of rural training centers that provide integrated courses in information technology, spoken English, workplace readiness and soft skills, dubbed the MAST program. Post-training, the foundation’s placements staff places its graduates in jobs across sectors including retail, business process outsourcing, banking and telecom.
- Mass Employment through Rural IT (MERIT) centers employ graduates from the MAST program for project-based outsourcing services to global and domestic clients.
- An entrepreneurship development program, dubbed DREAM, that empowers its graduates MAST graduates to start their own IT-enabled businesses, both through training and finance.
Since its inception, the foundation has trained over 8,000 students and recently achieved an 80 per cent job placement ratio. The organization was founded by Dipak Basu and his wife Radha Basu. Prior to starting Anudip, Dipak Basu was director, global center of expertise, at Cisco Systems. He is also a co-founder of NetHope, a technology alliance of the world’s largest aid agencies. Radha Basu, who currently helms Anudip as its CEO, founded Hewlett-Packard’s operations in Bangalore. Prior to Anudip, she was chairman and CEO of Nasdaq-listed Support.com, where she led the company through initial and secondary public offerings.
The organization started with three training centers in West Bengal and now runs more than a dozen across the state. It plans to expand its operations to other states in the coming months.
