WHY SKILL INDIA FAILED, WHAT SHOULD BE DONE NOW?
Skills are deciding factors that determine whether a person get the job or not in the cut throat competitive job market in India. India is one of the most populous country with huge young population. According to one estimate, almost 50% of the India’s population is below 26 years of age and around 65% of the population is below 35 years of age. This gives huge potential to Indian economy to boost its growth if it is able to garner the huge demographic dividend. But the data shows the other way round, India is suffering from the jobless growth for many decades and one of the major gap is that the employers are unable to find the skilled individuals and the individuals who are there in the job market find themselves not required by the employers because they are called unskilled or not properly skilled.
Recognising the importance of skills, Indian government came up with National Skill Development Policy in 2009 following which National Skill Development Mission(NSDM) was launched in 2010. Later, Modi government created Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) in 2014. The ministry has a function to meet the demands of National Skill Development Mission (NSDM) 2015. Then Govt. came up with famous Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) under Skill India mission.
Skill India Mission had the objective to meet employers needs of skills and prepare themselves by attaining skills so that they can secure decent livelihoods for themselves. PMKVY is the Govt’s flagship scheme under Skill India Mission whose objective is to enable and mobilise youth to take industrial skills training so that they can get a proper job. The scheme also adopted Recognition to Prior Learning (RPL) to improve skills of the people who have some prior training. According to MSDE report, under PMKVY 19.85 lakh candidates are trained out of which 13.23% got the post training job. The scheme was relaunched in 2016 as PMKVY 2.0, under this 52 lakh candidates successfully completed the training, out of which 24% candidates got post training placements. As shown by the data the biggest problem was low post training placements which signify that these policies were not able to impart the skills that were really demanded by the industry during this period. Also the sector which was worst affected by unemployment was the IT sector which has been the darling of Indian economy for last 2 decades. This shows that along with huge mismatch in the skill present and demanded, there is lack of training infrastructure which is effective in upskilling youth with the skills that are demanded by the industry.
There are number of reasons why Skill India has not been able to achieve success in its objective. First there is huge gap in the good quality training infrastructure, lack of holistic skills due to which they are not able to upgrade their skills according to the market demand. The other issue is lack of monitoring authority which can maintain the good standard of these training institutes. Also there is negligible private investment in the mission.
Govt. in 2016 got the recommendation from Sharda Prasad Committee in order to improve the effectiveness of the Skill India Mission. The recommendations included setting up of Vocational Education Training Centres(VETC) on the pattern of general courses like engineering. It also recommended National Skills University which will act as an affiliation body for all the VETC’s in the country. The committee also called for creation of National standards in line with the international standards of skill. It also recommended PPP model between governments, industry, SSCs and also establishment of national skill development fund called ‘Reimbursable Industry Contribution(RIC)’. It also recommended decreasing the no. of SSCs to meet the National Industrial Classification and creating a system for training the trainers and use of technology for achieving faster and efficient results.
Presently, India records only 45% of the trained individuals employable in the country and meagre 4.69% of workforce with vocational training. This shows that huge gap is there with respect to skills in the economy but despite that if the recommendations given by Sharda Prasad committee are applied diligently then we can improve this situation and become the skill capital of the world.
-Ankur Kumar (MBA, 57th batch)