PIPAL TREE FOUNDATION

Doubling Incomes through Skill Development

Founded by a passionate and visionary professional

Santosh Parulekar, PTF’s founder is an Engineer & MBA with a global work experience. Santosh has also received executive coaching at Harvard. Santosh is leveraging his global experience in doing skill development projects with innovative revenue generating mechanisms. This leads to self- sustainability within 5 years of PTF’s intervention. Santosh’s focus on scalability, transparency and process driven approach has led to PTFs presence in 8 States with 18 Centres. More importantly, new initiatives such as the low cost housing, have achieved a strong momentum in less than 3 years of start.

PTF skill training doubles family income in 3 months

Under privileged youth including women of 18 to 35 years, who are School dropouts, are trained by PTF. PTF provides residential training to ensure higher quality outcome. This training, though expensive by 25% compared to non-residential training, ensures higher quality skills, better paying jobs, faster and sustainable outcome. PTF places more than 85% of its trained youth with reputed companies such as Godrej, DMart amongst others. PTF’s experience over 8 years has shown that the family income conservatively doubles within 3 months, and in most cases, the increase is more than 3 fold. The trained youth get quick and sustained financial stability with a strong career path.

PTF keeps innovating to develop relevant women empowerment initiatives

PTF is amongst the few NGOs which consistently keeps trying to develop locally relevant and sustainable livelihood programs. For example, in past 3 years PTF has been working on
(i) Goat Farming
(ii) Oil extraction from abundantly available local Oil Seeds.
In both these initiatives, PTF has been trying to develop ways to create
(i) Direct market access with remunerative pricing (ii) Higher productivity through genetics and improved feed for Goat Farming
(iii) High ROI with minimal investment through locally developed Oil extraction machine.
In addition to these two, PTF is working on other rural development initiatives with potential of recurring income generation such as
(i) growing drumstick trees which need minimal water
(ii) training for truck driving as well as car driving
(iii) training to repair earth moving equipment

Construction sector domain knowledge is leveraged for entry into low cost housing

PTF has constructed 1500 houses at less than Rs6.5 lakhs (US$9300) per house in past 2 years. More importantly, it has developed an ability to construct 10,000 homes per annum. PTFs low cost housing initiative has 2 unique features. First, PTF tries to hire a family member from the beneficiary for whom the house is being constructed. This leads to skill training at zero cost for the family member. Second, PTF pays this family member Rs350 per day for his services. This provides an additional Rs16,000 income for the beneficiary’s family since the house is constructed in 45 days.

To conclude

We believe PTF is a strong ROLE MODEL for the skill development sector in India. PTF is marching ahead in its initiatives such as construction work skill training, low cost housing and women empowerment. We wish them success in scaling up their newer livelihood development programs.