12�THE ECONOMIC TIMES | MUMBAI | TUESDAY | 3 NOVEMBER 2015Career & Business Life

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Jharcraft

Emerging Challengesas a CSR FacilitatorJharkhand Silk Textile and Handicraft Development Corporation, popularly known as Jharcraft, has been making waves in India and abroad for over seven years, for its qual-ity and spirit of innovation. Managing director Dhirendra Kumar and his team left no stone unturned to make it a successful and profitable PSU in Jharkhand.

Since Jharcraft has dealt with women em-powerment, upliftment and rural development through Self-Help Groups (SHGs) from the beginning, it took CSR fa-cilitation as an opportunity to enable corporates to spend funds in the right way and that too in the right field. The trident role of Jharcraft (implementing agency > training + production > value chain) has not only facilitated CSR activities with funds from big/medium corporates, but has been increasing its own stakeholders in the journey of sustainable development.

Every organisation has responsibilities to-ward society and in the eight years of its exis-tence, Jharcraft has already established itself as a resourceful organisation for sustainable livelihood, training and development through its dedication and stakeholder approach.

Jharcraft approaches other organisations to collaborate with their CSR initiatives as an implementation agency. It seeks formation of SHGs in the areas around the corporate partner’s establishment and requests them to provide work-sheds, where Jharcraft provides looms, raw material and machineries for the craft, sericulture, etc., to the identified groups/individuals. Jharcraft then sends its master trainer to train them to be self-dependent to

the extent that they are able to find a source of earning. So far, Jharcraft has trained nearly 3,000 artisans and fashioned them as stakeholders in their value chain with the col-laborative effort of corporates like Thiess Minecs, SAIL Bokaro, NTPC Hazaribagh, Jindal Power Patratu, CCL Piparwar, SAIL Durgapur (West

Bengal), to name a few.Jharcraft has been successful in creating

a new benchmark in the domain of CSR and sustainable development by practically imple-menting public-private partnership for the ultimate cause – integrated development.

Dr SHYAMAL GOMES, Associate Professor, Xavier Institute of Social Service Ranchi

Shyamal Gomes

NEGC

It is Not Always Easy to QuitAbhilash Dubey (Abhilash) is employed as an assistant manager (control systems) with National Energy Generation Corporation (NEGC). NEGC is a public sector enterprise, which offers excellent career development opportunities for its employees in contrast to many government-owned companies.

NEGC offers a well-structured career path to its employees after successful completion of training. The presence of an efficient per-formance management system has always ensured that proper evalu-ation is done on the shortcomings of individual employees, followed up with very effective training pro-grammes to address the same.

Abhilash had made significant progress in this PSE in the last few years. Now, at a crucial juncture of his career, he was offered a higher position by one of the most coveted private conglomerates, Surya Infrastructure Group, in the country. Even this organisation offered high quality career development

plans to Abhilash.Though pleased that he had received the of-

fer, Abhilash was not excited and was not sure if he should share the news with his family and friends.

During the same time, Abhilash happened to meet Srividya Srinivasan, his college

friend who coincidently worked with the Surya Group. She had been with the group since six years and was quite content with her job. During the chance meeting, Srividya shared her experience with Surya Group and provided an insight into the organisation and its high quality work culture. Now,

Abhilash had to make a decision whether to join Surya Group or not.

He was aware that his decision would have a huge effect on his career and life. Abhilash was flummoxed – is it easy to quit or is it vice versa?

Prof. DIGANTA CHAKRABARTI,Associate Professor, FLAME University

DigantaChakrabarti

Prachi.Verma@timesgroup.com

New Delhi: Facing fierce competitionfrom startups, corporates are chasingfresh talent at the Indian Institutes ofTechnology through the internshiproute like never before. According toplacement cells at leading IITs – Delhi,Bombay, Kharagpur, Kanpur and Ma-dras – companies are slowly shifting tothe pre-placement offer route ratherthan limiting themselves to final place-ments.

“Many startups may not come on Day1 slot at IITs but they are surely eatinginto the talent pool available to corpo-rates. As a result, corporates are in-creasing the number of internship of-fers,” said IIT Kharagpur’s vicepresident, Technology Students'Gymkhana, Atal Ashutosh Agarwal.

The internship offers at the oldest IITin the country has risen almost 60%over last year in the corresponding pe-riod ending October. The total numberof companies coming with internshipoffers has also doubled than last year(till October), said Agarwal.

Around 15 big corporates are comingto IIT Bombay to pick interns for thefirst time this year, said a placement of-ficial at the institute. Most of them hadearlier come only during the finalplacements.

Startups are competing with corpo-rates for engineering talent: during lastplacement season at least one in 10 stu-dents of each batch at leading IITs wasestimated to have joined the new agecompanies. Hence, a large number ofcompanies that don't want to miss outon the cream of talent at the premier in-stitutes are either coming for the firsttime to the campus or are increasing

the number of interns, said campusrecruitment officials at Mumbai.

Some of these include American Ex-press, Capital One, Citi, Credit Suisse,Daikin (Japan), Deutsche Bank, Eaton,General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Goo-gle, Hindustan Unilever, ITC, JP Mor-gan, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Nomu-ra, Qualcomm, Robert Bosch,Samsung, Sony (Japan), Shell.

IIT Delhi witnessed doubling of offersthis year over last, with a total of 120 in-ternship offers coming in so far, most ofwhich were made by corporates.

For IIT Kanpur students, the totalnumber of internship offers is touch-ing 200 against 160 last year for the sameperiod.

“Lots of companies are shifting to-wards the PPO model, i.e., they hire stu-dents from pre-final year as interns andgive them pre-placement offers. The in-ternship hiring is also becoming moreand more competitive among the com-panies and is further pushed by the de-mand for talent from the start-ups,”

well as an increase in the number ofcompanies coming to IIT for interns,”said Kaustubha Mohanty, head of Cen-tre for Career Development at IIT Gu-wahati.

Domestic stipends are up 10-20% atmost of these IITs this year compared tolast year. For this year, it is about Rs60,000-90,000 per month.

“Top talent has to be rewarded well.There has been a significant rise in thestipend being paid to interns as well.Students who will be interning at Olawill get a valuable opportunity to earnand learn the way they used to in theValley a few years back,” said AmitMathur, Senior Director – HR & Head ofTalent Acquisition, Ola. This year, OlaCabs intends to increase its hiring bothon the summer internship front as wellas at the time of final placements,shared Mathur.

At IIT Bombay, the number of compa-nies coming for internship is compara-ble to the total number of firms visitingcampus for full-time recruitment, ac-cording to its placement manager.

“We have been increasing the numberof interns over the years. Our campus(WalmartLabs) hiring focuses on tech-nology and analytics talent. We willcontinue to grow in Bengaluru in theforeseeable future. We are building ateam here which has a clear focus to in-novate and build at scale,” said Jayaku-mar Kulakada, Vice President and Ma-naging Director, Walmart GlobalTechnology Services India Pvt Ltd.

The rush for interns by corporates isjust a reflection of the likely scramblefor engineering talent in the finalplacement days. With start-ups look-ing for more engineers, the competi-tion in the final placement is likely toget stiffer.

said Sidhant Khatri, overall placementcoordinator at IIT Kanpur. He addedthat the percentage conversion to PPOsfrom summer interns has also in-creased significantly over the years.

Sensing the preference of companiesto recruit through the PPO route, IITMadras has established an internshipoffice this year to streamline and ex-pand the internship recruitment proc-ess. “We hope this will result in an in-crease in the number of PPOs in thefuture as companies are looking at in-ternship as a better way to recruit fortheir organizations,” said P Chandra-mouli, professor & advisor for Intern-ship at IIT Madras. “The internshipprocess this year started in August andwe have so far placed about 140 studentsin 37 companies,” said Chandramouli.

At IIT Guwahati, over 90 students havealready got internship offers from vari-ous firms – the highest ever offers at theinstitute for the corresponding period.“This year, we are seeing highest num-ber of interns taken by companies as

Internships Gather Steam at IITs

STARTUPS ARE PUSHING THE DEMAND

IIT Madras has set up an internship cell this year to focus on PPOs

For IIT Bombay,hiring by startups is likely to go up to

20%of the batch this year from only 4% in 2013

IIT Delhi witnessed a

100%in internship offers this year comparedto last

At IIT Kharagpur, the number of companies coming with internship offers has doubled compared tolast year

The New Flavour

Around 15 big corporates are coming to IIT Bombay to pick up interns for the first time

With startups eating into talent pool of engineers, corporates picking up interns before the final placements

Brinda.Dasgupta@timesgroup.com

Bengaluru: IT software firm Intuit In-dia has rolled out new compensationsand health benefits for its employees,including increased maternity bene-fits, coverage for surrogacy and infer-tility treatment as well as additionalmedical cover for parents-in-law.

Intuit’s new medical plan provides in-creased maternity coverage for its over900 employees and dependents. Cover-age for normal deliveries has been in-

creased to .̀ 60,000 from .̀ 50,000. For C-section, the company will cover expens-es up to .̀ 75,000. The company has alsoextended medical cover to the third andfourth child. Surrogacy and infertilitytreatments will also now be covered un-der the new plan.

Under the company’s new group in-surance plan, coverage in case of deathand accident has been enhanced tothree times the base salary from twiceearlier. Additionally, staff will be cov-ered for 12 critical health conditions,including major burns, aorta surgery,major organ/bone marrow transplant,and loss of limbs due to injury or dis-ease, for up to .̀ 10 lakh.

The plan also allows Intuit staff to pur-chase additional medical cover fortheir parents-in-law.

“One of the highlights of the new planis the income protection clause, underwhich financial coverage is providedduring extended hospitalisation and

time away from work for medical rea-sons,” said Shikha Verma, C&B leader,India and APAC. “For prolonged medi-cal treatments, employees end up havingto go on long periods of leave withoutpay. Under this clause, their financialwell-being will be taken care of.” For upto three months of extended leave, anamount equivalent to three times theemployee’s monthly salary will be pro-vided, or .̀ 60,000, whichever is lower.

“The new group medical plan caters todifferent life-stages for our employees,whom we count as our biggest and mostimportant investment,” said SomnathBaishya, director and head-HR. “We’vekept in mind changing demographicsand have taken a diverse and intuitiveapproach to cover for actual realitiesthat our employees face.”

While a few of the benefits were rolledout in August, many are new, includingthe income protection clause. The mail-er that went out to Intuit employees last

week, which was viewed by The Eco-nomic Times, states “Life, as someoneonce said, is like a box of chocolates.You never know what you’re going toget… At Intuit, no matter what, we’ve#gotyoucovered”.

Many of the new changes have beenbrought into effect after consultationswith employees, said Sriniwasan Ra-maswami, talent engagement leader,India and APAC.

“While insurance policies at the ma-jority of companies provide coveragefor employees’ parents, Intuit has takena bold step by allowing for in-laws to becovered as well. This will provide a safe-ty cushion on top of additional medicalexpenses that may be incurred for agedand/or ailing parents and in-laws,”said Umesh Belludi, CEO of BrainTreeHR Consulting. “The new benefits at In-tuit will make an impact towards reten-tion of employees, besides showingthem that they are well taken care of.”

Benefits includeincreased cover formaternity , surrogacy andinfertility treatment, andparents-in-law

Intuit Extends Health Benefits of Employees