Express News Service
VILLUPURAM: Mahatma Gandhi once said the future of India lies in its villages. At a time when the world of technology is moving at a rapid pace, and the employment opportunities of the new age are directly related to how able you are to catch up with it, it is not a question of whether the youth of rural India need to be taught the latest technology. After all, they are the future of the country.
It is with this thought and motto that Villupuram-based free-software movement V-GLUG (Villupuram GNU/Linux Users Group) run by a group of techies from the town for a decade, has come up with a software skill training centre for rural youth of the district.
The centre, which will operate in collaboration with the State Skill Development Corporation and the district administration, was inaugurated by Villupuram MP D Ravikumar on Saturday. The first batch at the centre will have 30 young women getting trained with software skills free of cost.
General Secretary of V-GLUG, U Karkee said, “The software we teach is not just basics but the crucial ones used in big technology-based companies. We train them in the latest programming languages including Python which will otherwise be available at centres for a huge fee. With our training, these women can go to some of the biggest tech houses where only students of the top IT schools could go.” Karkee added that the opportunity could save their lives.
“With the working knowledge in such programming languages, the women will be placed for jobs that pay them over Rs 30,000 even as they enter the industry,” said Khalell Jaheer, V-GLUG coordinator.
D Haripriya, another coordinator, said the training will help many women come out of their houses to do jobs that pay well.
“For long, skill training for women only focused on indoor works that yielded low income, and through subsidised loans. They were caught in a cycle of earning and repaying loans without actually empowering them to get out of the clutches of financial constraints,” Haripriya said.
K Vijayalakshmi, a bioscience-software engineer at V-GLUG, added that this was a viable model as all those who availed of the training would be benefited unlike only a few making a fortune out of their skills.
