It takes quite an effort to get to Pahadpur in Mayurbhanj district of Odisha – the remote tribal village that is the ‘sasural’ of President Droupadi Murmu, and is closer to Ranchi in Jharkhand (192 kms away) than Bhubaneswar (280 kms). We take a flight to Ranchi, and then drive to Jamshedpur for a night halt before setting off at the crack of dawn for Pahadpur navigating through the uranium-rich hilly landscape to cross the border into Odisha. At Rairangpur we make a pitstop for breakfast at a small sweet shop that serves delicious poori and gugni (a local delicacy made with dried peas). The owner proudly tells us that sweets from the shop occasionally go to the Rashtrapati Bhawan. As we near Pahadpur, the vegetation — predominantly sal trees — turns sparse.

Pahadpur turns out to be a squeaky clean, pretty little village with the mud walls of the Santhali homes covered with vibrant artwork and murals. President Murmu’s own home is now a residential school for tribal children run by her SLS Trust. At the gate of her home is a large poster with the slogan “The power of education is unparalleled” and the image of her at Rashtrapati Bhawan. The SLS in SLS Trust stands for Shyam, Laxman and Sipun — the late husband and sons of the president.

Crossing the village we arrive at the L&T skill training hub that is fast emerging as an oasis of hope and gainful jobs in a region starved of employment options. Girls smartly clad in orange overalls and boys in green overalls receive us along with Sanjay Mansingh, the L&T engineer who heads the hub. From bar-bending to masonry, plumbing, welding, steel fixing to data entry, the boys and girls get skill training in a varied set of trades.

The girls from the data entry course are excited as in two days they will be finishing their residential training and after a brief visit home will be travelling together to Chennai to work as data entry operators at an L&T Site — for many of them it’s the first time they will be travelling out of the State. “For their first placement, we always send the girls together in a group so that they are not alone in a new place,” says Mansingh, describing how 36 girls from the centre work in Balotra, 54 in Panipat, and 21 in Jamnagar.

The Skill Hub, which is a tripartite partnership between President Murmu’s SLS Trust, Prayas Trust (a social welfare trust run by the spouses of L&T employees) and L&T Construction, has in the two plus years of its existence trained over 1,600 local youth and absorbed most of them.

It’s also showing the way as a replicable model for matching skill development with industry relevant jobs and more importantly placing the trainees in well paying jobs. Mansingh says so far the skill hub has trained 1,167 boys of whom 1,005 have been placed, and 12 are already frontline supervisors. This is also the first skill hub of L&T where girls are being trained — 569 girls have passed out and 167 placed, with five frontline supervisors. The average salary is ₹20,000 per month, though some star pupils get more. Right at the entrance is a pictorial list of girls who have successfully passed out, where they are working and how much they are earning. Most are from tribal communities. For instance, there is Salma Soren, trained in masonry, employed at L&T Hydrocarbon in Panipat, earning ₹20,000 per month, and Sumi Tudu employed at Balotra as a plumber also earning ₹20,000. A note of pride in his voice, Mansingh points to the picture of Tapaswani Mahanta from Keonjhar district, trained in bar-bending, who is now a front line supervisor.

A walk through the skill hub shows how well equipped and thoughtfully constructed it is. At the reception are huge posters depicting safety protocols, from wearing gloves to boots to helmets, protective vests and reflective jackets. As part of their course, the trainees are asked to draw what they learnt about safety and the drawings are astonishingly creative. Mansingh says occupational safety is a big component of the skill training. The classrooms have the latest tools of the trade but it is the practical labs where most of the action is. In a large hall, we see boys wearing protective glasses practising welding with intense focus.

With a heavy skew on construction for oil-refineries, much of the learning is outdoors where the trainees learn scaffolding, bar-bending, pipe holding and fitting — there are a lot of girls learning these skills too. The residential facility can accommodate 100 girls and 140 boys and wardens and housekeepers are from local villages. The duration of the courses ranges from 45 days to 2 months and the training — including the boarding and lodging — is free.

How it started

Meena Subrahmanyan, president, Prayas Trust, describes how poorly connected Mayurbhanj faced persistent development challenges with its per capita income far below Odisha average and most households depending on subsistence agriculture. “SLS Trust expressed the need to address this cause by skilling the local youth in the region. Responding to this request L&T—through Prayas Trust—established the Skill Hub in Pahadpur to provide industry‑relevant training, supporting young people in transitioning to formal employment and connecting them to the wider world.”

When President Murmu donated five acres of her own land for the hub, it was absolutely barren. But L&T went into mission mode – planting 3,000 trees, many of these fruit-bearing, even as the residential school with all facilities came up rapidly. “Despite the remote location and the need to build women‑focused systems from the ground up, L&T operationalised the institute in five and a half months, fully equipped and ready to function at scale,” says Subrahmanyan. The President chipped in with a beautiful rose garden called Shyam garden in the memory of her late husband.

Creating the infrastructure was the easy part, changing the mindset of the community and getting them to join the course was the challenging part. “Operating a skill training institute in a remote tribal region demanded a fundamental shift in the community’s mindset to sensitise them to send trainees,” says Subrahmanyan. “This was also L&T’s first institute designed with a focus on including women trainees to strengthen female representation in the construction workforce. So, the team at the Skill Hub encountered deep‑seated social norms. Many preferred early marriages over employment,” she adds.

Talk to Subroto Bagchi, who who served as Chairman of Odisha Skill Development Authority from 2016 to 2023, and who upon taking charge travelled 30 districts in 30 days by road to get a first hand feel of skill development in the State, and you get a sense of how big a challenge it is. “To begin with, I realised, the skilled individual in India is not respected. There is a caste system at work. The second was the pervasive issue of abysmally poor wages. This in itself makes skill development non-aspirational. An ITI student gets under rupees ten thousand as a starting salary. A peon in a government office, who is not skilled, gets twice as much,” he says.

Only 10 per cent employers in the organised sector offer sustainable jobs, points Bagchi. “Work in the unorganised sector means no regular payroll, seasonal employment, depressed wages, no health or long-term benefits. Forget about career planning, ongoing training and all that. Barring a handful of employers, most large companies do not hire. They engage a contractor’s subcontractor’s employee. These people are nothing more than disposable contract labour,” he says.

To an extent, the reforms Odisha has done in skill development has helped the L&T hub. For instance, in many other states, skilling projects suffer because foundational literacy is poor. Here, Mansingh says there was no problem on that count as the criteria of 10th pass and ITI training for some of the trades was met easily.

To conquer the mindset of the girls in the area, the best advertisement has been the alumni of the hub. Bright-eyed Amita Singh from Baripeda village who is learning data entry describes how she got inspired to join after seeing her friend’s training. “She did video calls showing the facilities and that convinced my parents,” she says. The biggest change, she says, is she is filled with confidence.

For Mansingh, whose family stays in Cuttack, the biggest fulfillment in this task he has been entrusted in a remote outpost, is the transformation among the locals. Earlier they struggled to get students, but now they get walk-ins all the time, enquiring about the courses. Will L&T scale and replicate this elsewhere?

The answer is an encouraging yes. Says Subrahmanyan, “L&T is already advancing replication. The upcoming CSTIs (construction skills training institutes) in Vadnagar (Gujarat) and Amaravati (Andhra Pradesh) are being developed on the Mayurbhanj model, with a women‑inclusive training ecosystem designed to broaden opportunities for skilled women across L&T project sites in India and overseas.”

(The writer visited Pahadpur at the invitation of L&T)

Published on March 2, 2026