Govt must focus on education and stimulating investment

It should let the market take care of skilling the workforce

Not even a tenth of the 30.67 lakh youth who had received or were undergoing training under the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) as on early-July have obtained job placement offers, according to a report in this newspaper. So, can this be seen as a failure of the Narendra Modi government’s flagship skills training and certification scheme? Jobs are not simply a function of the country’s workforce acquiring formal skills making them employable. More fundamental to job creation is a vibrant economy, in which investment and consumption fuel demand for labour, skilled and unskilled. Today’s crisis is not one of employability, but of investment and economic activity leading to shrinking job opportunities, whether for IT service professionals, draughtsmen, masons or fitters.

The problem with PMKVY is not its poor job placement record. Ideally, the government’s focus should be on providing decent education. That would mean ensuring minimum standards in schools, colleges, polytechnics and industrial training institutes (ITI). The ~12,000-crore outlay for PMKVY — mainly towards training modules of 150-300 hours duration, whose utility is doubtful — can instead be used to beef up the infrastructure and course content in 2,284 government ITIs. The government would do a great job by just concentrating on basic education, labour reforms and improving the ease of doing business. The market has ways to address the skills gap: You don’t need PMKVY or a ministry of skills development for that.