A year ago, Prabhat Kumar Behera, the 21-year-old son of Prasanna Behera, a resident of Maniabeda village in Odisha’s Dhenkanal district, lived in despair and hopelessness.
Abject poverty haunted him and his family, but today Mr Prabhat Behera leads a decent and dignified life and is able to sustain his family members.
All these changes have taken place after Mr Prabhat Behera, supported by GMR Group, learnt cellphone hardware configuration technology.
GMR Kamalanga Energy Limited, a sister concern of the GMR Group, has acquired a patch of land owned by Mr Prabhat Behera’s family for its project. Under the state government’s rehabilitation scheme, the family was given monetary compensation equivalent to the amount of land. However, the one-time compensation was exhausted on events like his sister’s marriage and buying bare necessities.
The GMR Group has facilitated cellphone hardware training for Mr Prabhat Behera and many other unemployed youth of the area. Now, they all earn Rs 6,000 to Rs 8,000 a month.
Mr Prabhat Behera, who has his own cellphone repairing workshop at the GMR Labour Colony Market, says his family no longer struggles to buy basic necessities like food, cloth and medicine. “We are quite self-sufficient now. Our brothers and sisters are going to school and we can afford medical expenditure of our family members,” he adds.
GMR Varalakshmi Foundation officials regularly interact with the local unemployed youth, study their intrinsic strengths and guide them to undertake suitable vocational activities to be self-reliant.
The Foundation has supported 31 youth from the families that had given up their land to take up training in trades like air-condition repairing, welding and learning basic machinery. Apart from this, 133 girls are also undergoing training in four tailoring centres.
Jayant Kumar Mohanty, programme leader, GMR Varalakshmi Foundat-ion, says that the Foundation makes provision for sale of farm produce in local markets as well as in cities like Cuttack, Bhubaneswar, and Angul at good prices.