The Indian automotive industry is a significant player contributing nearly 7.1% to the country’s GDP. With its wide penetration and strong influence on the country’s economic and industrial development, the auto sector has its moderate direct employment and significant indirect employment. It is estimated that the sector provides direct and indirect employment to over 19 million people.
By 2025, it is estimated that 70 per cent of Indians will be of working age. This “Demographic Dividend” could give India an edge over the developed countries. However, this Demographic Dividend can easily turn into a Demographic Disaster if a majority of the working age population remains unemployable due to lack of skills. Even today, one hears of a shortage of skilled workers across industries. This does not augur well for sustaining India’s economic growth.
Hella India, being one of the leading players in the global automobile component industry, focuses not just on providing high quality and technologically advanced parts & accessories, but also taking initiatives to skill and train technicians, provide them constant technical help through the Hot Line around the world to ensure high quality fitment. In this regard, building the technical capability of the Indian technicians of automotive workshops helps Indian consumers to experience world-class quality service. At the same time, it benefits the overall society by creating and protecting employment of less privileged workforce in the auto servicing industry.
Proper installation of products is as important to the safety of the vehicle as much as the quality of the product. Recognizing this fact and aligning with the Government’s “Skill India Movement”, Hella India Aftermarket has launched a novel initiative to enhance the skills of auto technicians. It launched its first Mobile Training Van (MTV) on a specially build vehicle, equipped with all amenities to conduct an effective training at the technician’s doorstep. Complete with audio-video presentation equipment, product demonstration facility and ergonomic seating, toilet and pantry, the MTV is travelling across the country to conduct training in areas with maximum concentration of auto mechanics.
The objective of this initiative is to provide training at the technician’s doorstep and also educate them with product features, functions, fitment, working and more. For advanced training and Q&A sessions, the van is equipped with facilities which can connect the trainer and the specialists operating at Hella’s corporate office in Gurugram via video conferencing.
By getting trained in the highly equipped training van at their premises, the mechanics and technicians feel a sense of pride and respect about their job. The emphasis is on high quality workmanship for maintaining the Indian automobile safe and fit so that it doesn’t become a killer on the road. Hella has adopted a multi-dimensional approach to ensure respect, training and social recognition of these technicians as this ensures the company’s vision of arresting road deaths to its logical conclusion.
The mobile training van provides them with the opportunity to develop their existing skills and increase their productivity and work quality. The greatest advantage of the training van is that it visits places all over India capturing all automobile industry-related markets and hub places where the training can brush up skills of these technicians in large numbers.
The Mobile Training Van was successfully launched on January 1 last where 14 technicians were trained and certified in one go. It was a great experience for them as they found the sessions useful – learning about features and performance, and the correct method of installing products such as lighting solutions, horns, brakes and wipers. It’s a logical step forward in the journey of Hella India to skill, empower and recognize the auto technician community who help keep the vehicle safer on Indian roads by applying genuine & standard parts & services and thus reducing deaths on Indian roads by eliminating any possibility of spurious and sub-standard servicing of cars.
Over the years, Hella India’s management has always had its thoughts about the betterment of the society. So it keeps coming up with such initiatives catering to all needs of different members of the society right from making school children understand the importance of road safety to keeping skills & knowledge of auto-mechanics and electricians updated.