IGI Logo

Ronnie Screwvala, a serial entrepreneur and Co-founder and Chairman of edtech platform upGrad, on Thursday hailed the newly-launched PM Internship Scheme, saying this initiative will empower million of talented youth in the country. 

upGrad has committed Rs 200 crore scholarship programme to train 1 lakh youth for the PM Internship Scheme. The initiative prioritises national-level skilling to bridge the education-employment gap for underserved youth.

“We hail the PM Internship scheme and its entire concept of focusing on skilling and internship. We have created a skilling programme across multiple dimensions, from soft sales to hard skills -- which will be free for the first one lakh people,” Screwvala told IANS.

upGrad has announced the Intern-Zip Programme, an initiative to train around 1 lakh learners in the current fiscal and accelerate talent mobility while bolstering PM Internship Scheme.

The skilling major has created a specialised course with nine comprehensive modules/virtual classrooms targeted towards individuals aged 20-24, and coming from non-tax-paying family backgrounds.

The course comes at no cost for the first 100,000 learners.

“With this initiative, we’re empowering a whole new community of aspiring individuals to get trained adequately and get placed across leading organisations/global capability centres/partner companies, leaving a stronger economic mark,” Screwvala noted.

Focused on three key areas, modules will cover technical savviness, soft skill mastery and professional development; skilling individuals in tools such as Microsoft Office (Word, PPT, Excel) and ChatGPT, including softer aspects like effective communication, problem-solving, time management, professional grooming, and optimising networking techniques in person/on social media.

“With skilling comes innovation that will lead us to be a creator economy vs a replicator or outsourcing economy. Intellectual Property creation is the wealth of any nation and economy,” said Screwvala.

More than 1.55 lakh candidates signed up for the PM Internship Scheme in just 24 hours.