Rahul Gandhi

New Delhi, March 2: Professionals from the corporate world are training members of the Congress’s youth wings, apparently because Rahul Gandhi believes additional management skills could come in handy in modern-day politics.

Sources said the job of training workers of the Indian Youth Congress and the party’s student wing NSUI had been “outsourced” to apolitical agencies at Rahul’s instance.

Youth Congress and NSUI office-bearers refused to call it “outsourcing” but confirmed the “involvement of professional agencies and experts from the corporate world in the training process”.

A Youth Congress leader said: “Experts from outside are involved but there are restrictions on us…. We cannot reveal the details.”

Such circumspection is probably based on a perception that many senior leaders of the parent organisation may find it difficult to digest the involvement of professional agencies.

But nobody has so far tried to question the move as the Youth Congress and the NSUI both come under Rahul. Some of the young leader’s initiatives in the past were initially greeted with scepticism by veterans who later welcomed them.

The sources said Rahul was compelled to tap outside “experts” as there was no system of training in the party.

Rahul, the sources added, also believes that corporate management skills would be an additional qualification in modern-day politics. “An institutionalised and uniform training process is a must and we are trying to create that system,” Youth Congress president Rajiv Satav said.

“Jitendra Singh, the AICC secretary attached to Rahul Gandhi, and young MPs Manik Tagore and Ashok Tanwar are training the members at present,” Satav added, but wouldn’t say if professional agencies were involved.

“The training is on several fronts; political, ideological and personality development,” he said, side-stepping a specific query on outourcing the training process.

Sources said the “experts” from outside were handling the non-political part of the training. “They hold five-day camps in states and concentrate on communication skills and team spirit. They tell the NSUI and Youth Congress members how to become a role model, play games to improve community feeling and team spirit and try to bolster the habit of sharing and service. They don’t touch politics or ideology,” said a source.

One of the agencies involved is Infosys Leadership Initiative, set up by the software firm.

The sources said the Congress had formal business deals with these agencies and money was being spent on the training, but no one would speak on record.

Youth Congress leader Man Singh, who is closely associated with the training programme, refused to discuss the matter. NSUI president Hibi Eden, who said training was being institutionalised, refused to answer queries related to non-political professional agencies.

But he said there was nothing wrong in seeking assistance from experts in building a resource pool of talent.

Eden said the party was also developing a system for evaluation of performance right from the level of the students’ wing. “This system is much better than the previous system of arbitrary nominations,” he added.

Those who insist Congress veterans alone should train the cadre admit that the prop from the corporate world wouldn’t have been required had the party heeded Sonia Gandhi’s repeated appeals for a training institute.

At the Shimla conclave in 2003, Sonia had made a formal announcement for setting up a Congress Training Academy. Till now, nothing has been done on that front.

Although an AICC general secretary, Janardan Dwivedi, is in charge of overall training within the party, there was hardly any training till Rahul started his own system in the youth wings.

Another party wing, the Seva Dal, is supposed to hold national training camps on a regular basis. But not a single camp has been held in the past three years.