The Odisha Knowledge Corporation Limited (OKCL) is not just a figment of imagination of the State Government. It is not either an idle piece of ostentation meant for displaying the vain glory of prodigality of the State ex-chequer. It is an essential need for bridging of the digital divide in providing e-empowerment to the bottom of the pyramid in our society. This will act as a stair to every youth to climb the ladder of success. This will ensure an intersection of the four emerging trends of the 21st century: digitisation, virtualisation, mobilisation and mass-personalisation. The man here at the helm of affairs is Dr Manoranjan Puthal. Success has dawned upon him like no fluke. A senior management executive achieving sanguine success year after year with revenue profit, and business growth objectives within startup, turnaround, and rapid-change environments, he follows his lofty goals from morning to midnight by making whirlwind tours to the nook and corner of the State the year around. A keen planner with expertise in project appraisal, evaluation, resource planning and deployment, project estimation, scheduling, tracking and implementation, he is an expert in strategic partnerships, leadership development, team leadership, operations management, customer relationship management and organic business growth. He also has wide-ranging experiences in ERP, CRM and PPP (BOOT) projects with complete delivery responsibility. He has worked with TISCO, AV Birla (EMIL), IndianOil, EC Railway, FACOR, Rungta Mines and Reliance Energy. He has earned a fat bouquet of awards in recognition of his achievements. In an interview to The Pioneer, Dr Puthal spoke to Sugyan Choudhury.
What’s unique about Odisha Knowledge Corporation Limited?
The main mission of the OKCL is to create new paradigms in education, governance and empowerment of people at large in the context of an emerging knowledge-based society and knowledge-based economy. It attempts to bring about the mainstreaming of this unique educational transformation through a continuous blend of pedagogic, technology and business innovations. This will create a unique blend of four mega trends of 21st century -- digitisation, virtualisation, mobilisation and mass-personalisation. It aims at bridging the digital divide through universalisation and integration of information technology in all walks of life. Its uniqueness is being a Special Purpose Vehicle promoted by the Government, yet a self-sustaining autonomous company. Its DNA is PPCP (public, private and community partnership). Government support and community participation is essential to fulfil its mandates given by the Government.
What are the challenges you face in striving towards the mandate?
The major challenge is to offer education, governance and empowerment solutions and services to a large and diverse population with world-class quality at an affordable cost with widest accessibility from cities to rural, tribal and hilly areas. Over these years, the OKCL has built an image among its 400+ entrepreneur partners who established 400+ IT training centres across the State. It has created a positive impact through its digital literacy programme, OS-CIT. With its presence in all districts, the OKCL has remarkably improved the access to high-quality computer education at affordable costs to masses. It has built a huge workforce; and more than 1.5 l youths are ready for 21st-century workplaces through the OS-CIT digital literate programme. It has also impacted school education in 4000 ICT computer labs in Government and Government-aided schools which has direct benefit to bridging the digital divide and make computer literacy and computer-aided education possible for 25 lakh students within a period of five years. The project has been evaluated by the Programme Performance & Outcome Monitoring Unit (PPOMU). The evaluation report states, “This project has visibly enhanced the level of motivation and engagement of students which has elevated the learning curve. The scholastic accomplishments of students, especially the slow learners, have increased due to greater clarity of students on the different subjects.”
How have your products and technologies been beneficial for youths and for the society?
All its products and services deploy state-of-the-art eLearning, eGovernance and eEmpowerment technologies in collaboration with the MKCL, which has many proven technologies and been working for years since 2000. All the OKCL technologies, products, solutions and services are comparable to the best options in the global context in terms of architecture, performance and customer satisfaction. The need of the time is to create a sustainable local self-employment for semi-urban and rural youths who cannot afford to migrate to cities. I am sure our effort to create workforces to grasp the opportunity for people has a potential to develop 2.5 million online freelancers. India has a potential to earn 20 billion US$ through online freelancing by 2025.
What is your experience working with the Government?
It is always a wonderful experience to be part of the Government and its policies to reach the rural and semi urban masses. The mandates given to us enable our presence in all rural belts to empower the “Last Person First” with our eEmpowerment programmes. Since its incorporation, our Chairmen and Board Members have guided us rationally to grow organic. Till date, the OKCL has paid Rs 90 lakh to the Government as dividend and contribution to the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund. Besides, it has contributed over Rs 7 crore to the Government exchequer in different forms during last seven years. In fact, by setting up the OKCL, the Government has benefited the State in making available a huge pool of digital citizens and creating new opportunities for employment generation for the last-mile person.
What is your corporate culture like?
Our corporate culture is a happening thing evolving all the time naturally. We are not building it commercially. Our leaders are seeing the possibilities with the last-mile people to ignite their growth engine. We are not sitting on somebody’s will; we are investing our time and energy to explore the possibilities with somebody to happen. Our corporate growth culture is to determine how many people’s lives we are touching and how deep is our operation to reach the last person of our society. All our employees, network partners and learners are tuned to openness of exploring all ideas from every member; and we are proud of the decent culture that our organisation carries with integrity. Our aim is to create equal opportunity, to identify the areas to have decent and dignified work for youths without any prejudice, discrimination to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, regional origin and veteran or disability status.