More than half of the population in India lives in absolute poverty. Since scarcely anybody from the lower class of the population has a school and least of all a professional education, there is no perspective for these people for a better life. Without a professional education the only work left for them to do is the hard and badly paid work in quarries, factories, as a seasonal worker on the rice fields, as a street hawker or Kuli on the streets.

The barycenter of work of the Kolping Society is in the federal state of Karnataka where measures in vocational training and income generating measures help young people find a way out of their forlorn situation. Vocational training in India just like in other parts of the world is the key to an economically secure future.

Therefore young people receive a professional qualification in order to gain access to a secure and well-paid job. Since in India there are already good institutions for vocational training, the Kolping Society would not like to invest the money in building its own centers of vocational training, but rather fund a re-payable scholarship for young people from the lower class of the population in one of the vocational training centers already in existence.

The Kolping Society supports apprenticeships in the following areas: electrics, bakery, motor mechanics, reparation of bicycles, computer software, physiotherapy, typography, nursing and tailoring and laboratory medicine among others. When young people gained ground in their job they pay back the scholarship, so that this then helps other adolescents, to relieve themselves of their precarious life situation. A real project of help to self-help!