The corona virus (COVID – 19) pandemic has been responsible for a global socio-economic crisis, and India is no exception. As the number of confirmed cases continues to spike up like never before, the marginalised families happen to bear the wrath of the calamity from all angles. The entire country, including the state of Jharkhand, has seen a massive loss of livelihood and large scale return of migrant workers including educated professionals, in the aftermath of COVID – 19 containment lockdown.
According to the records of Jharkhand government, about 7 lakh workers, stranded outside the state had registered with the government to return home and as of 10th June 2020, over 5 lakh migrant workers have returned to the state. The skill mapping results reveal that close to 70% of these migrant workers are skilled. Recreating job opportunities and facilitating livelihood, in both organised as well as unorganised sectors, is too challenging a task to be left to the government alone. Industry and civil society need to join the efforts of the government to mitigate the hardship of lakhs of affected families.
Pratigya, in association with National HRD Network (NHRDN Ranchi), and IIM Ranchi, has initiated Sanshray (Rekindling Hope) for making a comprehensive endeavor as a civil society to help lockdown affected families overcome both food and livelihood crisis.
The campaign has the following actionable objectives:
Seek partnership support from individuals as well as organisations for minimum sustenance
Help families overcome the livelihood challenge at the earliest by
1. Career counselling during difficult times
Sanshray aims to provide the best of career counselling to the migrant workers including educated professionals, so as to enable them to make informed decisions about their career paths. At a time when the families are worried and sceptical, personalized career counselling services will help the earning members gain confidence and enable them to make the correct decisions for a stable career
2. Facilitating their re-skilling
The post COVID-19 era will witness a gamut of new job roles, which in turn would demand new set of knowledge, skills and abilities. At Sanshray, we have foreseen the new recruitment trends, and hence carefully designed re-skilling and upskilling modules to make the existing skilled population competent and job – ready.
3. Connecting them to possible employers
Sanshray is privileged to be part of a community which is strongly connected with a large pool of prospective employers. This helps us to not only stop at career counselling and re-skilling, but also giving shape to the dreams by facilitating talent positioning.
4. Promoting self-employment through small loans
An effective way to bring about long term self-sufficiency among the marginalised families is to take them out of the wage income framework and facilitate self – employment by building a microenterprise. We envisage credit facilitation to these families, by way of introducing informal loan schemes which will ensure quick delivery of loan at the door step of the beneficiary.
Achievements of last year - 2020
During Covid-19 migrant crisis:
Supported monthly food ration kits to needy families
Created a database of job/skill seeking individuals
Connected individuals with respective jobs/skills
The database of affected families requiring food and livelihood support has been assiduously built through ground level survey which is a continuous process Transparency is the hallmark of Sanshray.
Family details with photographs, contact numbers, family profiles, skills; education level, basic minimum sustenance required from partners, have been hosted on this website. Utmost care has been taken not to bring any embarrassment to the affected families.
We look forward to your wholehearted participation in the campaign so that together we may create brighter rays of hope, deeper channels of camaraderie and stronger bonds of humanity.