Skill development in India : Need of the hour

  Strong and efficient work force is the back bone of any strong economy.  And for the developing countries like India, which aims to dominate the world, strong work force means more that that. 

  With 356 million of the India's population in the age group of 10-24,  it has the highest population of youth than any other country in the world, surpassing China. While this demographic strength can sound like a boon for India which is currently one of the fastest growing economies in the world, it is not exactly true. India certainly has the strength in terms of youth numbers, it is still merely a resource. It needs to harness this strength by training them and empowering them into skilled labor who can later contribute to its economy in a significant way. Without any training the youth will be taking up menial jobs for meager salary to finish a work inefficiently. This wouldn't help neither the youth nor their country to prosper economically.

   Knowing the importance of skill development of the youth, you expect India to already have very good skill development policies in place. But the truth is quiet the contrary. India adds 12 million people to its work force. Less than 4% of them gets some kind of formal training. This puts India in one of the worst countries in the world in terms of skilled labor. This is alarming giving the huge working population here. India spends thousands of crore rupees in skill development every year and the results are way below average. The reason for the poor performance is more the inefficient use of funds than the lack of funds. Going further we will look at the policies India implement in the Skill development and the reasons for its failure.

Flaws in the Government Policies:

   There are a number of government bodies working on skill development. Ministry of Labor and Employment (MoLE),  Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Nation Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), etc. All of them aiming to improve the skills of the labor. There is clearly a lot of redundancies involved. The government aims to skill 500 million people by 2022 without giving a clear definition of what skill is. There is not proper evaluation of the usage of funds. There is no benchmark to evaluate the results of the programs launched.

Changes Proposed:

    1. All the government bodies working for skill development must report to the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. Proper evaluation methods need to be implemented to make sure the funds are not misappropriated.

    2. Labor Market Information Systems should provide real time data on the labor employment trends and new opportunities. 

    3. Redesign Industrial Training Institutes (ITI) program. The industries, stake holders and the government needs to come together in defining the course curriculum so that the people graduating from the program should be employed easily.

    4.  While ITIs are designed for the people who have below par education, there must be "Technical and Vocational Training Institutes" for people who passed 10th standard and above. India can take examples of Finland, China which are successful in implementing TVTI's for empowering their youth. Currently there are a lot of Engineers graduating from poor Engineering colleges who remain unemployed since their education is not what the Industry requires. TVTIs provide a platform for the educated class (10th pass or above) to develop skill set required for the Industry instead of taking up less promising degree from a below par Engineering college.

     5.  Government should also take up help from NGOs like Vishwa Yuvak Kendra, who have been working to tackle the skill development program for nearly 50 years. 

Needless to say skill development in India is really complicated given its diversity. So, Govt. cannot solve this problem alone and needs all possible help. So, it should encourage all the Industrialists, Educational Institutes, Universities, NGO's, overseas Govt., to help tackle this problem. Without this India can't possible imagine to achieve its dram become a developed and prosperous nation.

Sources: The Hindu; The Guardian.