French IT major Capgemini has announced a new talent stream development initiative to offer home-based career opportunities to educated women in small towns and villages across India.

As part of this, Capgemini has launched Sakhi Drishtikon, an initiative to train and hire rural women graduates, post-graduates, or diploma holders in technical subjects from economically weaker families and bring them into the mainstream workforce.

Under this initiative, Capgemini will have 500 rural women from across rural India joining its workforce by the end of December while during calendar 2021, the company expects 15% of its fresh hiring to come from the new stream of rural talent.

Radhika Ramesh, Executive Vice President — Global Delivery Center Head, Cloud Infrastructure Services, Capgemini India, said, “Sakhi Drishtikon is a timely initiative which takes advantage of new ways of living and working. There are a large number of qualified rural women who are not able to explore career opportunities in the cities. We are not just trying to give them jobs; instead, we want to carve out a long-term career for them.”

In this direction, Capgemini had roped in a bunch of NGOs to identify eligible candidates from the villages to be part of this program. The chosen candidates are currently on a 4-5 month training and will be paid a salary of ₹3.8 lakh or more per annum or par with the fresh hires of Capgemini. A candidate needs to have 60% marks in academics and his/her family’s annual income should not exceed ₹1.8 lakh. All chosen candidates are offered free laptops and broadband connections at their homes.

200 mentors are of this program and the training will equip the candidates for jobs in the areas of Security, Cloud, and Data and eventually help them build a career path.

The initiative comes as the company believes that it is a fantastic workstream and it has the potential to become truly gender agnostic. Further, it aims to include all genders in it. The company is piloting this model in India, which can be replicated in other geographies as well.

The pandemic has shown that work can be handled seamlessly from anywhere in the country because of the telecom infrastructure and hence has egged on corporates to explore many avenues of service delivery as well as sourcing talent.