Bank of Maharashtra to train 4,685 candidates in life skills for FY 2017-18

Pune: The Bank of Maharashtra aims to train 4,685 candidates through 156 training batches at the Mahabank Rural Self Employment Training Institutes (MRSETI), in FY 2017-18. The initiative coincides with the United Nations efforts to commemorate the World Youth Skills Day on July 15, 2017. The occasion seeks to generate greater awareness of and discussion on the importance of technical, vocational education, and training and the development of other skills relevant to both local and global economies. According to the UN, young people are almost three times more likely to be unemployed than adults and continuously exposed to lower quality of jobs, greater labor market inequalities, and longer and more insecure school-to-work transitions. Skills and jobs for youth feature prominently in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and SDG target 4.4 calls for a substantial increase in the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills.

The Bank has identified 48 activities as thrust areas, which offer greater opportunity for self-employment in training programmes by MRSETIs. The MRSETI programme imparts unique and intensive short term residential self-employment training programmes at no cost to students after assessing the aptitude of the candidate. The students are hand held for preferential credit linkage with Banks. The follow-up is continued for further two years till the student gets sustainable livelihood.
Shri Ravindra Prabhakar Marathe, CEO & MD, Bank of Maharashtra said, “The Bank of Maharashtra has constantly endeavored to grow with the community and our MSRETIs are only an extension of our commitment towards empowering the youth around us, particularly in the villages. As a Bank with 55 per cent of its branches in the rural and semi-urban areas, we understand the necessity and importance of building a skilled workforce that can address the demands of a growing and vibrant economy such as ours. Our main objective is to impart training to at least 750 BPL candidates per year through each RSETI. While every trained candidate will have preferential access to Bank credit after entrepreneurial skill development, our aim is to help at least 70 per cent of our candidates set up a source of livelihood with at least 50 per cent using bank credit.”
The MRSETIs conduct entrepreneurship development programmes (EDP) across five main categories, agriculture (For eg. animal husbandry), products (For eg. tailoring), processes (For eg. photography) and general courses such as EDPs for debt recovery agents, skill upgradation & growth programmes, such as advanced mobile servicing and light motor vehicle driving. In addition the RSETIs also provide short duration training programmes for BCAs and debt recovery agents.

The Bank has so far helped 17,780 candidates earn a livelihood (64.03%) with training at the MRSETI’s in Pune, Aurangabad, Nagpur, Nasik, Amravati, Jalna and Thane with the objective of providing skill training to the rural youth. A total of 27,767 candidates have been trained through 1,125 training programmes, as of June 30, 2017.
The Bank of Maharashtra was amongst the first banks to set up a Mahabank Self Employment Training Institute at Pune in Dec 2001, followed by centres at Aurangabad and Nagpur in 2003. A total of two hundred and fifty students benefitted in the first year of the MRSETI Pune operations in the year 2001-02 conducted through ten batches.