Amazon partners with govt to provide jobs to people with disabilities

Amazon India signed a letter of intent (LoI) with the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment to engage with employable youth with a disability. The MoU which extends until March 2024 will aim to provide skilling and employment opportunities through Job fairs to tens of thousands of PwD across the country. 

The tripartite agreement between DePwD, SCPwD and Amazon focuses on skilling, certification, and entrepreneurship designed to uniquely enable and position PwD participation in mainstream society.

Amazon aims to provide people with disability, the needed support, training, and intervention. It aims to do this by creating an environment of acceptance and inclusion and an approach with a sensitized experience in their skilling experience. 

“We are super keen to go beyond what we have learnt in our own journey of employing persons with disabilities across different parts of our business, both in the frontlines as well as in leadership,” said Swati Rustagi, Director, DE&I, International Markets, WW Consumer, Amazon. “Now we are in some ways using our scale and size to make that a reality for a larger number of Indians and find the same opportunities,” added Rustagi.

Amazon will support interventions by the Ministry in their Resource centres nationally.

Dr. Virendra Kumar, Union Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment said this initiative will empower and create a brighter future for People with Disabilities. “I welcome Amazon India’s initiative towards building a more inclusive workforce.”

Akhil Saxena, Vice President, Customer Fulfilment - APAC, MENA, LATAM and WW Customer Service, Amazon, said that Persons with Disability in India face many challenges when looking to develop employable skills and in gaining meaningful employment. “With this project, we aim to focus on skilling and livelihood-oriented empowerment for PwDs, over a period of 12 to 24 months,” said Saxena. “This complements our existing programs to provide direct employment opportunities to under-represented cohorts." 

Additionally, the company also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Sarthak Educational Trust (SET) for a special grant of Rs 2.5 crore, which is directed toward reducing the skill gap in employable young PwDs through a Global Resource Center (GRC). The grant will be used to create a centre of excellence for employment and vocational training within Sarthak Global Resource Centre to support its effort to mainstream disability. The program will enable tens of thousands of people with a disability to register for employment via an exclusive job portal app. Along with supporting the operational costs for the job portal, Amazon will also be the knowledge partner to develop the online and offline training modules for e-commerce skilling.