Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday proposed to launch an ambitious scheme for providing internship opportunities in 500 top companies to 1 crore youth over a five-year period.
New Delhi: In a bid to provide jobs to the youth, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday proposed to launch an ambitious scheme for providing internship opportunities in 500 top companies to 1 crore youth over a five-year period. The government plans to engage with the top 500 companies to establish a “voluntary quota system” for hiring interns, as part of the employment package announced in the Budget 2024-25. The “quota system” would be based on the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) expenditure of these companies, Finance Secretary TV Somanathan told The Indian Express.
While speaking to IndianExpress, Somanathan stated that the details are still being worked out in consultation with the industry and might involve a mutually agreed-upon voluntary quota system based on CSR expenditure, with companies committing to a certain number of interns; additionally, companies will be allowed to use their backward and forward supply chains for skilling purposes.
During the budget presentation, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that under the scheme, an internship allowance of Rs 5,000 per month, along with a one-time assistance of Rs 6,000 will be provided to youths. “As the 5th scheme under the Prime Minister’s package, our government will launch a comprehensive scheme for providing internship opportunities in 500 top companies to 1 crore youth in five years,” Sitharaman said in her Budget speech. These youths will gain exposure for 12 months to real-life business environments, varied professions and employment opportunities.
The government is focused on ensuring that individuals at the margins can fully benefit from this internship scheme. “We won’t be giving them (companies) the type of people they would normally recruit because we don’t want to give them a subsidy for people they would have hired anyway. We will have a negative list also: Say, nobody from IITs, IIMs, chartered accountants, cost accountants, nobody who is paying income tax, nobody whose parent is a government servant, etc. We want it for the people who are left out of the normal channels of recruitment,” Somanathan was quoted as saying to IndianExpress.
The Finance Secretary, who also serves as the Expenditure Secretary, stated that interns would be selected based on “objective criteria.” “That’s the general Idea, but we will make it more concrete as we go. It will involve design challenges and we will be open to suggestions on how best to do it,” he added. During the budget presentation, Sitharaman said that companies will bear the training cost and 10 per cent of the internship cost from their CSR (corporate social responsibility) funds.