The Hindu Business Line : Why we need to ‘skill’ India

While 60-80 per cent of the workforce in most industrialised countries is equipped with marketable skills, in India only 5 per cent falls in that bracket.

— K. Murali Kumar

The Government has rightly put skill development high on its agenda.

M. Sairam
Anand Venkataraman

India’s population is likely to touch 1.4 billion by the first quarter of this century. About 12 million are expected to join the workforce every year, and about 800 million persons will be in the ‘productive working age group’ of 15-59 by 2015. This will result in the much talked of ‘demographic dividend’ only if these persons are ‘skilled’.

While 60-80 per cent of the workforce in most industrialised countries is equipped with marketable skills, in India only 5 per cent falls in that bracket.

Further, industry estimates that only about 40-50 per cent of the ‘out-turn’ from various technical and vocational streams is actually ‘employable’. This has resulted in the emergence of ‘skill gaps’ in various manufacturing and service sectors.

Upgrading and building

On observing the human resource and skill requirements in various manufacturing and service sectors, including formal and informal sectors, it emerges that the demand for skills is likely to occur at three broad levels — a very large pool of minimally educated human resource, a large pool of skilled persons, and a small yet significant pool of personnel with highly specialised skills.

Skill-building initiatives should span all these levels as follows:

Skill-building among the minimally educated workforce: Skill-building in this segment has to include ‘Farm to Work’, and ‘School to Work’ programmes targeted at the minimally educated workforce entering the non-agricultural sector for the first time and/or seeking seasonal employment.

The workforce has to be taught generic skills such as skills of basic operations on the factory shop-floor, basic machine operations, and compliance with safety and quality requirements. Skill-building also has to cover behavioural aspects, such as those pertaining to work culture — timeliness, reporting, and ability to work in an ‘organised set-up’.

Efforts towards enhancing employability of the ‘skilled’ workforce: This should cover aspects such as certification of prior learning, providing modular training for manufacturing and service sectors (such as stitching skills for those involved in garmenting, CNC machine operations for operators employed/seeking employment in an engineering set-up, training shop-floor executives in retail and imparting selling skills for executives involved in sales of financial products).

It should also include such initiatives as upgrading the technical and vocational curriculum, job-oriented training programmes, maintaining a skills registry to ensure market linkages, and building additional capacity. Skill-building initiatives should be performance-oriented and outcome-based.

Building specialised skills: Initiatives in this area should include setting up of institutes of higher learning (such as a specialised institutes for the automobile sector, or an institute focused on high-tech manufacturing and semi-conductors for the electronics sector, or one that fosters innovation and product development in the IT/ITES sector).

Such institutes should be a crucible for specialised skills in the workforce at an entry level as well for upgrading skills in the existing workforce. Capacity building towards increasing the supply of Ph.Ds/doctorates should also figure here.

The Road Ahead

The Government has rightly put skill development high on its agenda by formulating the National Skill Development Policy, which will be a major boost to activities in this space. Going forward, we see the building blocks of the solution rest on the following aspects:

Ensuring inclusivity: Skill-building initiatives should be inclusive and cover all sections of the human resource supply pool, that is, those from varied socio-economic backgrounds. Government, industry, and educational institutions would have to play an active part in these measures.

Achieving scale: The skill development measures need to be ‘scaleable’ — courses, delivery mechanisms, methods of testing and certifications should easily be replicable, aiming to train many more persons than in earlier programmes. This will ensure that the target of ‘skilling’ 12 million annually is met.

Driving alignment: The need is to align interventions of various stakeholders, namely Central and State Governments, industry, academia, and others spearheading skill development measures.

The alignment should stem from national and State-level objectives and boil down to the district level. Possible ways of integrating some of these measures with other schemes, such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, should be explored.

Focussing on standards: The initiatives should focus on developing a set of standards that conform to the respective sectors in the industry and are recognised by employers.

Standardisation is required in areas such accreditation, testing and certification to ensure skill-building activities occur within a commonly acceptable framework.

Linking funding to outcomes: Outcome-based measurements should serve to evaluate the effectiveness of skill-building programmes and serve as an input to course correction.

It is also critical that outcomes be measured so as to link funding of such skill-building programmes to outcomes. By doing so, workable models would flourish, and the efficiency and effectiveness of skill development would improve.

Fostering partnerships: Achieving ambitious targets is not possible by government alone.

Private participation is essential in framing courses, setting the curriculum, creating an environment for continuous training and recognition of prior learning among the workforce, as well as agreeing on standards and recognising certification, participating in training delivery as providers and commitment to hire trained resources. Private participation is also essential in exploring various models of public private partnership.

A ‘co-creation’-based approach by various stakeholders is critical for the success of skill development. Skill-building measures should focus on achieving the ambitious target of a skilled workforce of 500 million persons, thereby ensuring inclusive and sustainable growth.

Simultaneously, they should succeed in nurturing individual competence, developing industry competitiveness and building long-term capability at the national level.

(The authors are consultants at ICRA Management Consulting Services Ltd (IMaCS). The views are personal. blfeedback@thehindu.co.in)

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