Where are the skilled?

India has a challenge far more critical than unemployment unemployability. A huge chunk of our humongous and growing workforce is just not kitted for a job. If the countrys much-vaunted human dividend has to be harnessed,then we need to place skills-development at the heart of policy. Two reports from the farthest corners of the country,Kashmir and the Northeast,twinned in,and tussling with,their challenges of insurgency and underdevelopment,show the need to fast-track our skill development mission.

As this newspaper reported on Sunday,the Youth Employability Skill YES project,a residential training programme that was launched on a pilot basis in Manipur and Meghalaya earlier this year,saw 56 of its 78 trainees finding jobs. Meanwhile,in Kashmir,about 1,000 youngsters who trained for a variety of skills under Himayat,a project initiated by the Centre to tackle unemployment in the state,have got jobs across the country. The numbers are still small,but the scheme is far-reaching YES intends to target 8,000 youngsters across the Northeast and Himayat plans to give training to a lakh people over the next few years and its takeaway substantial.

We need to create an ecosystem for our workforce to gain and upgrade skills. The National Skill Development Corporation,which began a couple of years ago as a public-private partnership,is the flagship programme mandated to create 15 crore skilled workforce by 2022 and has a kitty of about Rs 1,000 crore,but industry needs to be far more pro-active. ITIs and polytechnics which were meant to be the hubs of industrial training have been languishing with inadequate infrastructure and instruction and need to be restructured to meet local market needs. Our workforce is hobbled in many stages there is a glaring lack of sound certification programmes for skills like,say,carpentry,nor is there the environment for the trained to continuously advance their capabilities from certificates to diplomas to degrees. YES and Himayat are hopeful,significant pointers to the large-scale skillset that we need to provide.