TRRAIN, brings the focus on frontend retail professionals

B S Nagesh a top name in the retail industry who headed Shoppers Stop and Hyper City is now making a mark with TRRAIN (Trust for Retailers and Retail Associates of India). A much respected veteran in India’s retail space, Nagesh always nurtured a dream to do something for the frontend employees

in retail sector. Having had a very successful career at Shoppers Stop, Nagesh went on to fulfil his dream when he founded TRRAIN in 2011 with partners, Sheetal Choksi (a former colleague, now Co-founder) and Ameesha Prabhu (CEO).

TRRAIN, its mission and vision

Empowering people in retail is the simple vision of TRRAIN. Nagesh always wanted to do something for the retail industry from a non-profit perspective and with TRRAIN he has taken the initiative forward. “Since it’s my personal trust and charity, I don’t have the resources. So we created a mission saying we will be part leaders and part catalyst. We will do it not for profit but in a sustainable way,” he says. Some clear words describing TRRAIN are: path leaders, catalysts, sustainable, not for profit. These are the key words around which the organisation was created.

Elaborating on the research done for launching TRRAIN, Nagesh explains, “We met many retailers and their employees and did a lot of qualitative and quantitative research and identified three broad areas to focus on. First, pride and respect. People employed at the lower level, confessed they will not allow family members to join retail. There’s no pride in the industry, they are working for. It was clear we had to do something for the industry and employees. We also saw a lack of respect among supervisors, shopkeepers and even customers.” In order to infuse a sense of pride among retail employees TRRAIN launched ‘RED or Retail Employees Day’ on December 12. Simply put it’s an employee’s day which the owners celebrate thereby inculcating a sense of pride and belonging among employees.

The second focus area was skills and grooming for career development as well as health and social security. “We found it strange that they lived their life as sales associates while nobody created further opportunities for them. We want to work on skills and inclusion because if we build inclusion, the society will feel proud about the industry and the industry will feel proud about being included. Since 90 per cent of the associates are working in traditional centres, where if their owners are good only then they are taken care of, else they are left to fend for themselves.”

Focus on differently abled

TRRAIN identified that nearly 70 million people are differently abled in the county and out of them not even 1 per cent were employed. Except a few like Costa Coffee and CCD, nobody had looked at this segment for employment. So, TRRAIN decided to make this one of its key inclusions. Further, TRRAIN tied up with another partner, Youth4Jobs, and mapped the various roles in retail. “There are 130 odd roles in retail of which we identified 30 that could be done by people who are orthopedically disabled or hearing impaired and are 7 to 10th passed. We did a 45-day classroom training programme in Hyderabad with 22 differently abled in the first batch. We trained them for 15 days on the job,” informs Nagesh.

In the first year itself, they trained 22, second year 100, third year 500, and this year, it is set to reach 1,100 and all have got jobs in hand. Currently, TRRAIN has 10 centres and by the end of this year, it will add two more. “We want to be only catalysts, and have not opened any centre except our model centre in Santa Cruz (Mumbai). All others are our partner centres,” he exclaims.

TRRAIN has also started training courses to teach English, computers, commercial Maths and the skills required in retail. It’s an 18-hour programme that was started with a small batch at Inorbit Mall. Over the last two-three quarters, it has customised the programme. “Our dream is to open another 100 centres by next year so that we can impact 10,000 youth coming into the retail industry. At this rate we should be able to achieve our goals provided we have the resources and manage to get more and more people involved as funders, donors, companies and associates,” he sums up.