Telangana govt’s skilling programme gives smalltown students a booster shot at pharma careers

Hyderabad: For 25-year-old Peddagolla Madhavi from Bilalpur village near Zaheerabad, landing a Rs 3.5 lakh per annum job at a Hyderabad-based pharma company was a life-changing moment.

Coming from a family dependent on welfare after her father's abandonment and her mother's disability, this opportunity to work in a contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) was a dream come true.Similarly, 22-year-old Vanjari Gayathri from Sangareddy district secured a position as a research and development trainee at the same company, Sai Life Sciences. Having lost her father a decade ago, Gayathri always dreamed of becoming a scientist working on drug development.Birru Ramya, 25, from Kesamudram in Mahabubabad district, secured a paid internship at Aragen Lifesciences, which offers a monthly stipend of Rs 15,000 and potential permanent placement at Rs 2.5 LPA after four months.These women are among 140 chemistry students that made the cut from over 1,500 applicants of 40 colleges in Telangana for an industry-curated skilling pilot programme rolled out by Telangana govt late last year through the Centre for Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), a thematic healthcare and life sciences centre set up by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in collaboration with Telangana govt.

“The best part was doing lab experiments at University of Hyderabad (UoH) and getting to visit labs of companies. Now I’m looking for accommodation as I have to join by the end of this month," said a thrilled Gayathri in fluent English, describing the practical training that helped her bridge theoretical knowledge garnered in college with hands-on industry experience and soft skills gained from the programme.The students were put through 64 hours of technical training, 40 hours of soft skills training, and eight days of intensive lab training at UoH.

Industry experts from various companies and academic institutions too participated in the curriculum designing and training. "Telangana’s youth have immense potential. With a curriculum shaped in close collaboration with industry to reflect real-world needs and a targeted, market-aligned training programme, we were able to transform them into globally competitive professionals by prioritising high-demand skill areas and soft skills training,” said Telangana IT and industries Minister D Sridhar Babu, who mooted the idea in November 2024.This pilot is just the beginning of the govt’s vision to skill 50,000 youth for the life sciences sector over the next five years and position the state as India's most future-ready workforce hub, he added.Though 108 candidates eventually completed the programme, 78 participated in placements and all bagged placements or paid internships, with some even getting multiple offers, said Shakthi Nagappan, director — life sciences and pharma, Telangana.Nagappan said the pilot’s success has now encouraged them to focus more aggressively on smaller towns towns to create more opportunities for rural students in Telangana's pharma sector.Plans are afoot to roll out programmes in biotech, bioinformatics, biostatistics as well as AI and ML and scale up the programme to target over 2,000 students in 2025-36. “We are talking to global institutions like Dublin-based National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT) to curate programmes that can help skill youth for jobs in global capability centres (GCCs),” he added.