MPL plant head Sabyasachi Mukherjee inaugurates the computer education centre at Pallarpur village in Nirsa, Dhanbad, on Tuesday. Picture by Gautam Dey

Call it a power major’s gift to empower the youth.

Maithon Power Limited (MPL) has set up a computer education centre to impart free tech lessons to altogether 250 students and unemployed youths of Pallarpur village in Nirsa block, located about 35km from Dhanbad district headquarters and in the vicinity of the power major’s 1050MW plant.

The centre, which was inaugurated by MPL plant head Sabyasachi Mukherjee on Tuesday, has come up at an upgraded middle school of Pallarpur where MPL had earlier conducted free classes as part of its corporate social responsibility to help the weak students.

Company executives like corporate social responsibility wing’s head Mritunjay Ray, IT officer Ashok Lal were present on the occasion along with Pallarpur panchayat mukhiya Bishwarup Mandal, school principal Ashwin Ghosh and other teachers.

Of the 250 beneficiaries, 200 are students from Class V to VIII of the host school, while the remaining 50 are unemployed youths in the age group of 20-30.

MPL will continue the training for a year and have roped in local NGO Rah Society. While two expert faculty members of the NGO will take the classes, the project will be fully sponsored by MPL. The power firm has earmarked Rs 13 lakh for the programme.

The 250 trainees have been divided into five batches of 50 each. The hourlong classes will be held six days a week, expect Sunday, from 8am to 1pm during which they will learn how to use Microsoft Word, Excel, Power Point and Access as well as surf the Internet. While the computer classes will be held from Monday to Friday, the candidates will get training on multimedia on every Saturday.

Asked how the beneficiaries were selected, the power major’s CSR head Mritunjay Ray said: “We conducted a survey in the village and held meetings with the parents to know their opinion on computer training. We also apprised them of the advantages of such lessons.” Ray added that a written examination of the interested students was conducted in order to ascertain their ability to understand English.

For selecting the unemployed youths, secretary of Rah Society Rajiv Ranjan said, only those who have cleared matriculation and can operate new-age mobile phones were selected for the programme.

MPL’s public relation officer Abhishek Singh said that their main aim was to link education with job-oriented training in order to decrease the dropout rate.