Skilled For Dignity: Four Young Lives Reshaped Through Skilling Initiatives
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Before sunrise in Parkal, a small town in Telangana’s Warangal district, Chilupuri Varalakshmi is already up. There are two children to feed and dress, a house to set in order, and then a 35-kilometre journey to make — one bus, and if she misses it, the whole day is gone. She has done this run enough times to know exactly what losing that bus costs her: not a delay, but an entire day of training struck off, with no way to make it up.
Varalakshmi, 27, grew up in a farming household where money was never quite certain enough to plan around. She married, had two children, and wanted more for them than the uncertainty she’d known. As soon as she heard about a training programme running through the Head Held High Foundation, backed by HDFC Bank’s Parivartan CSR initiative, she signed up — despite the distance, despite the double shift of motherhood and travel that came before every class even started.
She’s a Customer Service Associate now, working with Techno Task Business Solutions and taking home ₹11,000 a month. It isn’t a windfall. But it’s hers, earned on her own terms, and it changes what her family’s future looks like.
Her story is one of four, drawn from four different states, all part of the same programme — called Make India Capable, or MIC — and all sharing a certain shape, even where the details diverge sharply.
Take Jitendra Kumar Sah. He’s the youngest of seven children from Muzaffarpur, Bihar, and his early years were hard in a way that’s difficult to soften with language: his father’s alcoholism, the poverty that followed, school abandoned before it could really begin. Hunger, he says, was simply part of growing up. There was a point where he came close to giving up entirely.
He didn’t. He left for Bangalore, worked in a factory under conditions he doesn’t dwell on, then found slightly steadier ground at a supermarket. It was there — or rather, alongside that work — that he found the MIC programme. What it gave him wasn’t just a skill set but something closer to permission: the confidence to imagine himself in a role he’d never previously had access to.
Today he works with Airtel, earning close to ₹24,000 a month — a figure that, set against where he started, says more than most résumés manage to.
In Ismailpur village near Faridabad, Haryana, Shivani Kumari’s turning point arrived differently. Her father fell ill, her mother struggled to hold the household together financially, and as the eldest child, the responsibility landed on Shivani almost by default. She’d finished her 12th standard, but that was where her formal education stopped — there simply wasn’t room for more, not with a family that needed her elsewhere.
The MIC programme taught her typing, communication, the kind of workplace confidence that doesn’t show up on a certificate but decides whether an interview goes well or badly. She’s now a Patient Coordinator at Kayakalp Health Care LLP, earning ₹16,775 a month, and the pressure that had sat on her family for years has eased, at least a little.
And in Gulbarga, Karnataka, there’s Akash Aiappa Mudvel — who left school after 10th standard for reasons that will sound familiar by now, and went to work as a driver in Pune. It was there that the gaps in his own education became hard to ignore forms he couldn’t quite fill out, paperwork that stalled him in ways his driving skills never could.
What sets Akash’s story apart is what he did about it. Once he joined the Head Held High training in Gulbarga, he didn’t just attend — he stayed back after class, repeatedly, working through his reading and writing on his own time because the regular sessions weren’t quite enough. He picked up video editing and PowerPoint along the way. He’s a Technician now, at Ganesh Industries in Pune, earning ₹13,000 a month. The job title has changed, certainly. But so has something less visible — a young man who kept closing gaps in himself, one evening at a time, until there weren’t many left.
What connects these four isn’t geography — Telangana, Bihar, Haryana and Karnataka don’t share much beyond a map. It isn’t even the type of work they’ve landed in, which ranges from customer service to telecom to healthcare administration to technical work on a factory floor. What connects them is closer to a habit: the willingness to keep showing up. To catch the bus even when catching it is hard. To stay back after class when the day is already long. To ask for help when asking is the harder thing to do.
HDFC Bank Parivartan has backed the MIC programme, and Head Held High Foundation has run it on the ground, but neither organisation can manufacture the will it takes to travel 35 kilometres for a class or to keep going after nearly giving up. What they can do — and, in these four cases, appear to have done — is meet that will halfway: with training, with structure, with an open door where previously there wasn’t one.
This International Youth Day, Varalakshmi, Jitendra, Shivani and Akash stand in for a much larger number — thousands of young people the programme has moved, in one way or another, from uncertainty toward something more stable. Their circumstances were never identical. But the outcome, in each case, reads the same way: a job, an income, and a measure of dignity that no one can easily take back.
