Toyota Trains India Teens

The carmaker's Bangalore institute aims to give poor teenagers a leg up and produce skilled workers for the subcontinent's auto boom

Morning exercises at the Toyota Technical Training Institute outside of Bangalore NAMAS BHOJANI

by Nandini Lakshman

When Harish Hanumantharayappa returned to his native village of Buraganahalli, India, a few months ago, his old schoolmates thought he was weird. Harish, 17, came wearing a Toyota (TM) uniform: beige T-shirt neatly tucked into his gray pants, gleaming black shoes, and a red cap. His friends in the village 65 miles from Bangalore also found him full of odd habits—crossing the muddy village roads, for example, Harish would stop, point his fore and middle fingers, look right and left, and then cross. He told his amused friends that he was practicing what he was taught at the Toyota Technical Training Institute (TTTI) at Bidadi on the outskirts of Bangalore.

Harish, who comes from a family that lives below the poverty line of $177 in annual income, was a good student but had no particular ambition. Then, last April, his schoolteacher alerted him to an advertisement by Toyota in the local paper. The automaker was inviting applications from 17-year-old, poor and needy students for factory training. It was offering free board, lodging, and education, plus a monthly stipend of $38. There were 5,000 applicants, and Harish was one of 64 boys from the southern state of Karnataka who made it to Toyota Tech, the training institute that opened last August as Toyota's first outside of Japan.

He now wants to be an automotive engineer. "I am so happy and can't believe," says Harish in his broken English about how his life and dreams have changed. They sure have. His mother and grandmother earn 65¢ daily as farm laborers, a brother is a bus cleaner, and a sister is training to be a nurse. But Harish is determined to change his life thanks to Toyota. In the three months he has been at the institute, he has saved $8 to give to his mother. "I want to make her proud," he says, outlining his determination to excel in his three-year course and bag the $180 and $230 fellowships for assiduous students.

Auto Boom Requires Talent

Toyota has spent $5.6 million to set up the institute, which has a faculty of 21 permanent, on-contract, and part-time employees. Toyota execs emphasize that it makes good business sense to operate the center in India (BusinessWeek.com, 12/3/07). The country's automobile market is among the fastest-growing in the world at 1.5 million cars sold annually, a figure that is expected to double to 3 million by 2010. "For us to manufacture more cars, we must have good people. The institute is such a step toward that," says Toyota India Managing Director Atsushi Toyoshima.

Like most Indian and global auto players, Toyota—which has been selling its cars in India for a decade now—is also expanding its business in Karnataka. Toyota has utilized one-third of its 400-acre Bidadi plot for its plant and other facilities, with a capacity to make 60,000 cars a year for now. The only models Toyota sells in India are the Corolla, Camry, and the popular multipurpose vehicle Innova—a far cry from competitor Honda (HMC), which is doing far better with a wider range that includes the Accord, Civic, City, and CRV. Toyota has plans to launch a new Corolla model this year and, like other players, is also working on a new low-cost car for India, to be launched by 2010. By then, Toyota wants to expand its current 4% market share to 10%.

But expansion requires talent, and India is woefully short of such specialized technical talent and education. There are around 4,500 state-run technical institutes littered across India. At a time when manufacturing in India is booming, these institutes are considered outdated. There's talk of them being privatized, but nothing much has happened.