I am Sugandha Sukrutaraj who is an Ashoka fellow and the Founder and Honorary CEO of AMBA. We enable alternate learning, leading to employment, for a very niche community – adults with moderate to severe intellectual disability.
They comprise 10 million in India.
Man: What is your name?
1: Rohith Parida
Peer Trainer, AMBA
2: Kenith Mathews
Peer Trainer, AMBA
3: Anil Kumar
Peer Director, AMBA
4: ‘My name is Anil Kumar. I am a data operator. I am working here since 6 years. I’ll do data entry. I am a peer director here’
Everywhere I went, it was all about denial. How can these guys do it? Even the special educators, the people who were addressing them, wouldn’t believe that these young men & women could do that.
So the best way was to put them into an environment that was comfortable for them, where people understood them.
At the same time we meant business, we did business.
We took them through the learning process, we hand held them through the process. We brought in back office work.
Most of the kids who came to us, they said they had finished their 7th & 8th standard.
But what was crazy was none of them could recognise the ‘a’ or any alphabet, for that matter.
One thing led to another… Having researched for about a year & a half and not finding any solution anywhere, I went to the Airforce and it gave me space. Then Intel gave me 10 laptops.Then I went out and found the spectrum of intellectual disability.
I found that they were not really given the dignity they deserved.
We tried to teach them the alphabet and slowly, within about 6 months, they were doing things – visual matching processes.
We created templates and so on. 6 months down the line, we were doing 3,000 forms of receipt printing, in half the time. We have 475 centres today, which are in the different stages of training.
Today 30 of them are work ready, these are 475 AMBA certified partner centres.
We collaborate with them. 80% of our centres are in rural India.
We handhold them, we bring them to Bangalore, we train them using peers because you & I are not capable of doing the training.
I have a team of about 15 people in rotation.
The other aspect of what we do is, we go out and try and find the business, which is the most difficult thing to do.
Once I can get people to come to the AMBA centre, and to see their capability, then the sky is the limit.
But, to get people to come, is difficult.
For 8 years we were working mostly for telecommunications. We were doing customer application forms, welcome
letters, receipt printing for Tata Teleservices initially. Airtel and Idea also gave us work, but always through the vendor.
Thereafter, we went and did work for CMI, many of the other market & research people, insurance companies.
Go into the villages… People say why don’t you teach them, train them & place them? Who is going to take them?
Even if someone takes them into cafes and organisations, they take only the more able ones.
Thanks to ICT, sitting here in Bangalore, we can enable work from Delhi, Bombay or anywhere, to all these villages.
We don’t worry about the behaviour. When people come here they bite each other, they bleed. I’ve been hit by them, and they are not insane. It’s just the frustration inside them that brings out these things.
But the minute you give them an environment that is conducive to them, it has never taken longer than 2 months for them to overcome that disrupt and to become contributors to what we do at AMBA core centre.
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