The Hindu Business Line : The course to take

Sriperumbudur, near Chennai, is known as the base for global companies making mobile phones, cars and PCs. Now, the area is becoming an embryonic centre for higher education. Young workers in its high-tech factories are hitting the learning highway.

“Once we finish our work shift, we rush back home, complete household chores and sit down to study.”

Sufia Tippu

Everyone knows that Sriperumbudur, near Chennai, has metamorphosed into a world-class manufacturing hub, with Nokia, Samsung and other handset manufacturers churning out millions of phones for the Indian and global market. Many might also know that it came into the limelight with the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

But what might have escaped notice is that Sriperumbudur has become an embryonic centre for higher education.

It is not about sprawling university campuses being built. Nor is it about high-tech Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) being announced by the Central government.

It’s all about a tiny ripple being created by scores of young men and women in the range of 18-22 years enrolling for higher studies through distance learning — which is bound to lead to a much larger wave of an educated mass from the rural areas in the long term.

Take, for instance, Annamalai University in Tamil Nadu. “The intake has more than tripled over last year and student enrolment from Sriperumbudur is increasing year by year,” says Prof S.B. Nageswara Rao, Director of Distance Education, of the university.

The Sriperumbudur story started when the first investment was done by Hyundai when it set up its factory in 1999. Then it went into stealth mode till 2004, when the former Nokia CEO, Jorma Ollila, chose Sriperumbudur over Bangalore, Hyderabad and Delhi. There was no stopping the flow that was coming in to turn this sleepy village into a bustling global manufacturing hub.

Today, it has become a high-tech manufacturing cluster with more than $2 billion having been invested in the special economic zones where not only handset manufacturers but other electronic component makers such as Flextronics, Foxconn, Jabil, Perlos, Salcomp, Aspocomp as well as PC makers such as Dell have set up manufacturing facilities for millions of mobile phones, chargers, set-top boxes, PCs and telecom base stations.

Today, it is this story of young workers wanting to study further that is being now written out in finer print amidst the banner announcements of foreign direct investments (FDIs) and global manufacturers coming in to set up manufacturing units.

Women in the forefront

More than three-fourths of the total workforce of about 20,000 in the age group of 19-22 years of the entire Sriperumbudur belt have gone in for distance education courses. Majority of them are girls who, having just completed high school, have enrolled for higher studies through correspondence courses.

Incidentally, this young crowd of workers that pours out of the factories every eight hours is noticeably different from the daily exodus from call centre units in bigger cities in India.

While most of the latter come from fairly educated and a typical middle-class background, and spend their income mostly on themselves and sometimes give to their parents, these young girls from Sriperumbudur come from very poor families and, in some cases, are the sole breadwinners for the entire family.

Says Sachin Saxena, operations director, Nokia India, “Once they start earning some money of their own, they realise that education is an important channel through which they can move on ahead and many of them start looking at enrolling for distance education.”

“When our parents and brothers realise that we can earn this amount of money, they usually don’t discourage us when we say we would like to study further. Once we finish our work shift, we rush back home, complete our household chores and sit down to study,” says 18-year-old Lavanya, who earns around $100 a month at Perlos factory, a significant amount of money, considering that her father would have not have earned even half of this in a month.

Four factors

The kind of subjects they usually enrol for is English where they get tutored in spoken English from the NGOs who have set up shop there. “They like simple and easy courses because of four things: getting a degree means improving their self-image, being able to speak English means more promotions could come their way, three, their prospects would improve in the marriage market, and four, they would be able to coach their children in English — something their parents could never do,” adds Father Bosco, who runs a charity organisation Don Bosco Vazhikattu (Don Bosco show the way)

Although Arto Makela, General Manager, India operations, Salcomp Manufacturing India, which makes chargers for mobile phones, feels that higher education is good, “there are different categories of employees that require different skill-sets. If every worker is a graduate we cannot employ them here, but when they come here and become a graduate, it is a good for the country in the long run,” he says.

Companies do encourage workers to study and are working out schemes through which both can benefit.

“We are working on schemes that would be mutually beneficial for them as well as for us — we would like to offer them incentives to study but we would also like them to work for us later,” says G. Dhanapal, manager, human resources, Perlos, a component supplier to Nokia.

And most of the young girls, having tasted the pleasure of earning their own income despite the fact that almost all of it goes to their parents, have no real plans to quit and look for different jobs.

“Learning to speak English is wonderful. I am sure after I get married, my husband would be proud that I work in a big factory and that I have a degree too,” says P. Nithya, a 20-year old Nokia employee who is doing a correspondence course in English Literature.

The author is a Bangalore-based freelance journalist.

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