People, prepared - not just placed.

I grew up in a family shaped by entrepreneurship, public service, and law. My mother built and ran her own handloom, textile, pickle, and oyster mushroom businesses independently, while my father was a lawyer before he passed away in November 2014. My uncle is also a politician, and growing up around his election campaigns gave me an early understanding of public life and community engagement.

During my undergraduate years at St. Joseph College, Jakhama, I joined the NCC hoping to join the Army, and served for eight years. Medical reasons prevented me from pursuing that path, but I kept building my interest in tourism, business, and entrepreneurship, including a national business pitch competition in Kerala, where my bio-electricity generator business model was selected for the model stage among 287 participants and over 113 startups from across India. That experience opened up my network and my understanding of entrepreneurship considerably.

Before starting Nagasekai, I worked with Arm's Incorporation, Educenter, Eagle Crest, and Furusawa Language Academy, gaining experiences across business, education, tourism, and human resource development that shaped what I wanted Nagasekai to be: a way to make career counselling and international placement more accessible, practical, and financially manageable.

One experience has stayed with me more than any other: seeing how vulnerable job seekers from Northeast India could become in the international placement process. Many candidates spent large amounts of money and years in training with no clear or reliable path to real employment. Some training institutes took advantage of that demand, and the lack of coordination between training and placement agencies made things worse. In places like Arunachal Pradesh, I saw candidates pushed toward opportunities without proper screening or attention to whether the role actually suited them or led anywhere. That made the real problem clear to me: the Northeast didn't need more training institutes or placement agencies; it needed a transparent, connected, and accountable human resource system that actually protects candidates. That's one of the core reasons I started Nagasekai.

My hope for the next few years is for Nagasekai to become one of the leading forces in Northeast India's human resource sector, building a network strong enough to connect the region's talent with opportunities across the world, and becoming the first name people think of for international career pathways, training, and placement. I want us to build a powerful network of candidates, training institutions, employers, and placement partners, serving both experienced and first-time job seekers, and ultimately to lead the Northeast's human resource sector and set the standard for how its talent is trained, connected, and placed globally.

- Sumong Pongener, Founder, Nagasekai Consultancy