International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Research

Authors
Dr. Saundarya Rajesh, Anju Rakesh, Dr. Divya Kumar

Abstract
Project PUTHRI is an initiative, which contributes towards women empowerment particularly school going children through offering mentorship and support to them. In any nation economic progress could be attained through girl child’s education and empowerment. Project PUTHRI focuses towards empowering underprivileged teenage girls from the downtrodden socio economic status by offering them mentorship programs that would help them emotionally and morally thereby leading them towards following their own dreams. Project PUTHRI is India’s first ever initiative, which has chosen 10,000 female children across Tamil Nadu and Puducherry and offered mentorship and counseling to them. The underlying principle of project PUTHRI is to act as a social awakening tool. Besides, this project intends to make sure that girl children gain access to tertiary education and ensure that they get corporate sector jobs upon their graduation. This project is keen on providing them the potential to exhibit flexibility, capability towards working towards passion, pay attention to their careers and to make progress as an individual in the society. Mentor, role-model and employment exposure with the help of career coaches are the three important dimensions through which Project PUTHRI empowers the girl children of the society. The aim of this research is to investigate the role of mentor competence towards the development of career intentionality among underprivileged girls in India in the context of Project PUTHRI. A conceptual framework inspired by the Mentor Competency Framework of Johnson (2003) has been developed exclusively for this research work. Primary quantitative data was collected from 80 mentors who have been part of the mentorship programme based on the questionnaire designed for the framework developed and a statistical analysis was carried out with SPSS. The results reveal that mentor virtues, mentor competencies and mentor abilities create an impact in enhancing the career intentionality of the PUTHRI participants.