Sohini Sinha, Head, Learning and Talent Management, Tata Electronics speaks about their efforts to recruit, skill and train women employees in precision engineering and also in partnering with the community to bring about change at the Turbocharged Tamil Nadu seminar organised by Industrial Economist.
The electronics devices industry is growing and will continue to grow. It could be as large as 1.3 to 1.4 trillion in a matter of three years or so. India alone could be about 200 billion dollar market. Some of the large brands in this space are increasingly focusing on the customer end, innovation, design, marketing and increasingly moved their manufacturing capability and outsourced it. This has led to another large sector which is the electronics contract manufacturing sector. Most of this is based in China and to an extent in Taiwan. This is a very large sector which isn’t visible to the customer but these organisations have deepened their engineering and manufacturing capability and have managed to convert the design of the device manufacturers to real products that we all use.
What is also emerging in the last few years, is the awareness of fragility of our supply chain. Covid has also underscored this reality even more. We see a trend where many large organisations are trying to de-risk our supply chain and also reconfigure supply chain for reliability. Most organisations in this space have a China plus one policy.
Taking an advantage of this, the Indian government focusses a lot on this sector in forms of subsidies. That is where Tata’s come into the picture. We are trying to make the first Indian foot print in the electronic contract services manufacturing sector. We have just begun our very first operation on the outskirts of Hosur and we are in the process of setting up a large plant over a 577 acre plot.
It is a completely new space and there are not many organisations operating in this space beyond China and Taiwan. There is a whole set of new challenges for us with a combination of factors like very high level of precision, engineering, speed, high volume and new materials. This combination is new to us and we are in the process of learning and figuring out how to crack this.
The next challenge is people. We don’t have the necessary talent right from technician, shop floor personnel to engineering and we are growing it internally. In terms of technology, we are trying to figure out platform technology where we have to meet capability. We will grow in a short time through automation, industry 4.0, IOT and it isn’t sufficient to build a talent pool that is capable for today but we are looking to skill them with higher order cognitive skills to meet future demands also.
As have to build a talent pool, we decided to have women in 90 per cent of shop floor roles. We have seen women operating in a lot in businesses which are essentially around assembly but we are talking about CNC machining and a whole lot of technologies which are not traditionally a women’s domain.
We are hiring class 12 passed out women directly from the villages in Tamil Nadu and other states. We have a selection process, skill them, invest heavily in developing their technical capability, also the behavioral strength and ability that are required for a transition into the industrial career. The local government machinery is being leveraged to reach out and communicate with people across villages. We plan to focus on education also. We want to build a body of female workers who are capable and strong and make positive impact in their societies.
There can be no development without social impact. From day 1 we are talking about how we work with communities around us. We did a sociological research of a 30 km radius. We have reached out to 55 villages to understand the lives and livelihoods of these community. Our attempt is to engage and build a thriving community around us.
We have done a lot of work around vaccination. Organised self-help group in dairy for women, worked with local farmers and so on.. We are also working on local issues like man-elephant conflict. This is our attempt and it has been an brilliant experience for us with lot more to do.
Watch the entire video of Sohini Sinha speak at the session here.
