Facilitating skill based education for rural youth

Interview with Vinay Bhartia, India Head, Lark and Sandeep Powar, Director of HR, MPTA Education

How has your platform helped in the education of young people in rural India?

Sandeep Powar: It has helped by connecting our trainers and mobilisers spread across the country for easy, seamless and effective communication and business continuity.

MPTA Education is a leading organisation offering an array of services in skill-based education and vocational training to enhance employability of rural and deprived youth by facilitating mobilisation, training & retaining high quality apprentices to build a skilled workforce. MPTA manages hundreds of team members and thousands of students across 12 states in India, all with different languages and cultural backgrounds, facilitating the need for a robust communication platform.

Challenge – With no unified system to manage mission critical tasks like attendance tracking and people movement, MPTA was resorting to a hodgepodge of third-party systems, making management difficult. Approvals was also an issue for MPTA as the lack of a unified system meant that approvals were normally done on paper, making it difficult for management to keep track of business needs.

Association with Lark – MPTA works by teaming up with hundreds of companies across India to provide young people from rural parts, the skills for vocational and on the job training. Lark with its robust messaging features helped the team to switch from Whatsapp to Lark Suite for business communication. Lark’s customisable attendance tracker allowed managers to keep track of staff straight from Lark’s mobile app, leading to smoother team management and employee happiness. Lark also provided MPTA with market-leading customer support, ensuring that the company and its vast network of partners could quickly master Lark’s many features. The program is instrumental in shaping the future of 10,000 students every year.

Are you working in specific regions? Any particular demographic profile?

Sandeep Powar: We have operations in almost 12 states where we provide on job trainees to the industry and also, have more than 18 training centres set up in rural areas to train and deploy in the industry.

Connectivity is a major challenge in rural areas, how has your organisation/platform effectively managed to bridge the gap?

Sandeep Powar: Actually, the youth comes from rural India. But they are deputed very much in urban areas where industries dwell. We have employees who mostly work as mobilisers in rural areas and Lark has been a great help in communicating with these mobilisers including sharing of documents even on a mobile without the need of a laptop/desktop and email.

Vinay Bhartia: Lark is committed to being inclusive for all stakeholders in an organisation. The sole purpose of Lark is to enable people and

teams who need to work together to achieve their goal through seamless connectivity.

Also, our development teams work continuously to not only work on introducing new features but also improving operational efficiencies such as new bandwidth-saving features for a joyful seamless experience.

How many people were trained in these villages? Is it an ongoing project?

Sandeep Powar: More than 1000 students are trained on an average every month in the rural areas where we have set up our training centres.

Vinay Bhartia: For the example cited above, there is a 500+ member team involved which is using Lark as a single point seamless solution for communication and collaboration. MPTA is heavily engaged with a variety of Lark’s features with around 90 per cent of MPTA account users on Lark considered as extremely active.

What are your plans for the company with reference to reaching the hinterlands of India, and enable remote collaboration in such places?

Sandeep Powar: As stated earlier, we are working PAN India, but as of now only our direct employees are using it. Lark is working effectively even in these rural areas where our employees are able to connect through Lark.

Vinay Bhartia: The rise and adaptation of internet has been enabled by the efforts of government, telecom operators and internet service providers. I think the internet generally in India is solid now and with mobile internet the penetration is deeper now. At Lark, the few steps that are important for us to ensure for a user solution like ours that we are a cloud native and mobile friendly platform. So, you are not dependent on your laptop or desktop where you can’t move. A mobile first approach helps keep larger organisations connected and communicate better.

At Lark, we are constantly improving our product in order to fulfill our users’ needs better. In terms of partnerships, we have three partner programs: distributor, reseller, and ISV. We will increase our network to work with more distributors to ensure Lark suite reaches all professionals who require one-platform solution for all their office needs.