No jobs as solar skills training falls flat
When Sukhwinder Singh, Mitali Sinh and Raman Sorout signed up to train as solar technicians, they had hoped to find jobs in India’s growing solar-energy sector. But none of them did.
Trained under the Suryamitra programme, a flagship project of India’s Skill Council for Green Jobs, all three spent months looking for work in the solar industry but drew a blank.
The programme’s main objective is to train high-school leavers and vocational diploma holders as field technicians to operate and manage solar energy projects that are key to meeting India’s renewable energy goal of 500 gigawatts by 2030.
Six years since its inception, the skills programme has trained 78,000 people around the country to install solar panels, connect them to grids and maintain batteries.
But government data shows that less than a third of participants have found jobs in the solar industry.
Solar capacity mushroomed from 2,632 megawatts in 2014 to nearly 51 gigawatts by February this year - enough to power more than 1.5 million homes, besides street lighting and water pumps. Yet there has been slow uptake of rooftop solar schemes in cities while many big solar parks are yet to take off, delayed by challenges in acquiring large tracts of land.
Jobs in the sector, meanwhile, are hard to come by, say energy experts.
“Solar technicians have the potential to become indispensable, just like car mechanics,” said Chetan Singh Solanki, founder of the Energy Swaraj Foundation, a non-profit that works on ways to reduce climate-heating emissions.
“But policies have become bottlenecks, slowing down growth in the sector and reducing job opportunities for thousands who are being trained.”
Data for 2019-2020, analysed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, shows that of the 16,074 people who were trained and received government certificates, just over two- thirds - 11,025 - did not get jobs in the solar sector.
Trainers said success varied according to the location of large solar projects, tie- ups between some training centres and private firms, and students’ willingness to move to remote areas for work, with the states of West Bengal, Telangana and Madhya Pradesh seeing the highest levels of job placement.
But Singh, Sinh and Sorout were not among the lucky ones.
Singh now works in the gardening section of a horticulture department, while Sinh is an assistant forest guard and Sorout is unemployed. “I heard about the training from a friend and was quite excited because I know the use of solar is increasing,” said Sorout, 23, who lives in Palwal in northern Haryana state with his parents.
“In farms around us, solar pumps are being used for irrigation. I thought after doing the course, I will easily find a job to maintain solar units. It’s been two years and all I am doing is helping with household chores,” he added.
The average salary for Suryamitra-certified technicians is ₹15,000/month, but placement agencies point out that private companies often find cheaper, unskilled labour to do the same job. This year, many training centres are yet to even begin the three-month programme, keeping applicants on hold as they work out new financial models to sustain the initiative.