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We produce the country’s backbone, yet ours are overlooked.
“What chances does a farmer’s son get growing up in one of the most rural villages of Odisha?” asks Bahadalapur’s Surendra Kumar Malik. “Our produces are the backbone of today’s society and it is us who suffer from inequality the most,” he adds.
Growing up in a little village on the banks of Brahmani river, poverty was a constant companion for Surendra. His family owns a small piece of land, farming which promised an irregular income of about INR 9000 to INR10, 000, should the crops survive the “extreme heat or rain.”
Since childhood, Surendra had no option but to pick up a sickle to help his father on the farm, sometimes at the cost of his education. But his passion to learn and study drove him ahead, and he became a postgraduate from a college in Jajpur, more than 100 kilometres away. “I travelled for more than six hours daily to attend college, before returning home to help on the farm,” he reveals.
Surendra was the first person from his village to become a postgraduate. But similar to many, the 22-year-old’s major weakness was in communicating in English. “I also did not have any employability skills and I realised that I was at the bottom of the pecking order,” he says, before adding, “This hurt my job prospects, as was evident in the consecutive rejections.”
Back-to-back rejections, lack of skills and family pressure to follow his father’s footsteps “made me stressed, frustrated and lonely.” But his luck had one last card to play.
A pamphlet distributed by ANUDIP’s Bomikhal centre caught Surendra’s attention. He visited the centre afterwards and “decided to pursue an impressive low-cost training course to develop new-age skills.”
Surendra invested the next three months in learning Communicative English, Professional Development, IT Fundamentals, Logical Reasoning and other subjects. His efforts bore fruit soon, as he “cleared an interview and received a job offer from an MNC.”
Surendra is currently working for Capgemini, one of the leading IT companies in India, as a Desktop Support Executive with a respectable monthly salary of INR 30,000. “Glad to have stuck with my decision to not start farming,” quips Surendra, who is also his family’s first-ever white-collar job holder.
