Around 600 employees of Delhi Metro have taken up online courses costing up to Rs 12,000 during the lockdown period.
In the times of job cuts and layoffs, India’s biggest metro employer, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), is offering its employees online courses to enhance their skills. The courses are available for all regular and contractual employees with two years of service.
The employees have an option to select between two types of courses: a generic course that can be undertaken by employees of all departments; and a specialized course that is department-specific.
The employees can undertake courses for a period of three weeks to a maximum of 12 weeks. The maximum fee provision for the online course is Rs 12,000. The amount is reimbursed by the company after completion of the course. Notably, no prior approval is required for the employees to join these courses, although post-facto approval from competent authority will be required once the office reopens.
These courses which DMRC employees are eligible to do are being offered by National Programme on Technology Enhance Learning (NPTEL), founded by IITs and IISc, non-profit organisation edX and Coursera. These courses are conducted by experts and institutions like IIT Roorkee, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Madras and some international institutions like ETH Zurich, TUMx, McGilx, Technical University of Denmark and Harward University to name a few.
The general courses include natural disasters, smart cities, future cities, solar energy, six sigma, etc to name a few, while specialized courses include data analytics and decision making, noise management, cloud computing, energy with environmental constraints to name a few.
A DMRC employee, who is undertaking this course, on condition of anonymity said, “The Covid-19 lockdown is a good opportunity to add on skills to your current work profile. I stay in Delhi alone and my family is in Madhya Pradesh. So, I thought to utilize this time. I am doing a course in traffic flow modeling and intelligent transport system being.”
The DMRC has currently 14,000 employees and around 600 of them are availing the opportunity during the Covid-19 lockdown.
Talking to Outlook, DMRC Corporate Communication executive director Anuj Dayal said, “DMRC is offering a number of online courses for its employees so that they can enhance their professional skills and capabilities. Both generic and department-specific courses have been provided and DMRC shall reimburse the expenditure incurred in taking up these courses.”