upGrad Pledges Rs 200 Cr For PM Internship Scheme

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 said.

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.