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Even $3 billion may fall short when it comes to skill development programs in India.
Since last year, the PMKVY has trained some 20,00,000 persons out of which only 81,978 got jobs. The program also suffers from a high drop-out rate. An investigation has revealed that corporate trainers benefit the most as funds get funnelled to them without any ground level results.
Walking the talk, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has opened the coffers and announced 2 big budget schemes that will work towards making millions of young Indians more employable.
The last 2 weeks has seen the PMs cabinet approving 2 major skill development schemes, totalling up to a whopping ₹22,000 crore ($3.3 billion). Such initiatives are needed and are critical for India’s future as the country will be home to the highest number of working-age persons—over one billion—by 2050, in the Asia-Pacific region.
Here are the scheme details:
On July 13, the cabinet approved a ₹12,000-crore skill development plan under the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) to train some 10 million Indians over a period of 4 years. The skills will cater to domestic industries and also those “aligned to international standards for overseas employment in Gulf countries, Europe, and other overseas destinations,” the government said in a statement.
A week earlier, on July 5, the cabinet cleared a ₹10,000-crore apprenticeship program to train 5 million people by 2020. “The scheme will catalyze the entire apprenticeship ecosystem in the country and it will offer a win-win situation for all stakeholders. It is expected to become one of the most powerful skill-delivery vehicles in the country,” a government statement said.
“This is a big step for us towards empowering the youth of our country and we are certain to strengthen the system and make training more effective with robust monitoring,” Rajiv Pratap Rudy, India’s skill development minister, said last week.
The skill development / upgradation push comes at a time when India is trying to reinvent and project itself as a manufacturing powerhouse and the PM is inviting global manufacturing giants to operate out of India. More industries mean more jobs, and if India doesn’t have a continuous supply of skilled labour, these companies might look elsewhere.
It is a matter of concern that similar programs in the past have not exactly been a success. Let’s quickly take a look at the figures. Although, since its launch in July last year, the PMKVY has trained some 20,00,000 persons, only 81,978 of them got jobs. The program also suffers from a high drop-out rate as discovered by education-focused NGO Pratham 2015. Some go back to their villages after training and others just stop mid-way, the findings said.
In fact the Standard Training Assessment Reward (STAR) scheme, launched by the UPA government didn’t have any placement record for the almost million people it trained so there is no way to judge the efficacy of that program.
To many it may not come as a surprise that an investigation by the Outlook magazine in August 2015, revealed that the real benefits of the investments made into the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC)—a public private partnership that provides funds to organisations that provide skills training—went to corporates. The money provided by the NSDC was funnelled to private skills trainers, often employed by big corporates, but there were hardly any outcomes, the investigation found.
The entire Skill India program also largely ignores the terrible state of school-level education in the country. Primary school students can’t perform basic arithmetic problems or even read text that they should be able to.
In its proposals for a new national education policy, the government has pointed out these grim realities, but there hasn’t been any big-bang announcement to reform the country’s education system