NEW DELHI : The Union Cabinet on Thursday focused on a huge deficit of the skilled hands and took three decisions to have a sufficient skilled young workforce by 2022.
It cleared a new national policy for skill development and entrepreneurship, set up a national skill development mission to undertake the task with a mission spirit and constituted a 9-member panel to prevent duplication of schemes in the field.
The new policy overtaked the national policy on skill development formulated by the previous UPA government in 2009 while envisaging its review after five years in tune with emerging national and international trends.
The urgency to have a skilled workforce to meet the needs of the economic reforms has been felt equally by the UPA government as also by the Modi government to capture the demographic potential of India’s youth as majority of India’s population is of working age. Prime Minister Narendra Modi acknowledged the formidable scale of this challenge by setting up the first dedicated Department of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship on July 31 last year. It was converted into a separate full-fledged ministry on November 9.
Why the urgency? The government-run National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) brought out in its 68th round of data that only 4.69% of India’s total workforce has undergone formal skill training, compared to 52% in the United States, 68% in the UK, 75% in Germany, 80% in Japan and 96% in South Korea. As such there is huge demand for the skilled workers who are just not available.
The NSSO estimated 104 million fresh entrants to the workforce requiring skill training by 2022 while 298 million of the existing workforce will require additional skill training over the same time period.
The Policy has four thrust areas. It addresses key obstacles to skilling, including low aspirational value, lack of integration with formal education, lack of focus on outcomes, low quality of training infrastructure and trainers, etc. Further, the Policy seeks to align supply and demand for skills by bridging existing skill gaps, promoting industry engagement, operationalising a quality assurance framework, leverage technology and promoting greater opportunities for apprenticeship training. Equity is also a focus of the Policy, which targets skilling opportunities for socially/geographically marginalised and disadvantaged groups.
The National Skill Development Mission cleared by the Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister will provide an institutional framework to the Centre and the states for implementing the skill activities in the country. The mission will have a 3-tired structure: PM will chair the apex body that will provide policy guidance while the concerned skill development minister will head the steering committee and the ministry’s secretary will handle the programmes as the mission director.
The Cabinet also set up a committee of secretaries for drawing up common norms across all skill development schemes to prevent duplication by different ministries and departments as it was found out that the multiplicity of norms and parameters created confusion in running of 70 and odd skill development programmes by the Centre.
The committee has been tasked to finalise common norms to define the skill development courses and their alignment with the national skills qualification framework to ensure that all programmes are outcome focused. Headed by the skill development secretary, the committee will have representatives from the concerned central ministries as also from the National Skill Development Agency and National Skill Development Corporation.
“While the common norms would be applicable to the central schemes, the state governments are also expected to align their skill development schemes with these norms to bring in uniformity and standardization,” a ministry spokesman said.
Focus of the new policy cleared by the Cabinet is to produce skilled hands on a large scale at speed with high standards and to promote a culture of entrepreneurship to generate wealth and employment to ensure sustainable livelihoods for all citizens in the country, he said.
