Skill body to rope in pvt players over QCI for evaluation

The skill development ministry will not take help from Centre’s quality control watchdog to inspect and evaluate the former’s training centres, following complaints of inefficient and inept inspection.

The National Skill Development Council (NSDC) has, instead, decided to rope in private agencies of global repute to do the job for it. Inspection of the skill centres is the first step towards granting accreditation and affiliation to them. Accreditation and affiliation are awarded by the National Council on Vocational Training (NCVT) on the basis of Quality Council of India (QCI) inspection report.

“We are fed up with QCI because of many reasons. These include ineffective handling of the amount of work this agency has taken up across the country. There have been inspection related complaints. A junior person is sent for inspection of the training centre or he or she is saddled with the responsibility of inspecting 4-5 centres of different trades. In some cases, the centre was rejected for trivial reasons,” said Manish Kumar, CEO and managing director of NSDC.

Launched in July 2015 by PM Narendra Modi, the much-hyped scheme with a corpus of ₹1,500 crore, which was later increased to ₹6,000 crore, aimed at training 2.4 million youth at 2500 training centres in the first phase.

The NSDC disbursed ₹1,099 crore out of the total budget of ₹1500 crore till March 31, 2017.

Kumar said, “As a mitigating measure for effective inspection of the centres, we are planning to rope in private sector inspection agencies of national and global repute. We would soon go for expression of interest and invite tenders from companies that would be selected to become part of our inspection panel. We have to do away with the monopoly.”

The NSDC had earlier too initiated the process of inviting private sector companies but it did not materialise as it did not get the skill ministry’s nod

Dr RP Singh, secretary general, QCI, said since October 2016 QCI has completed evaluation of about 4,500 training partners and over 10,000 training centres have already logged on the SMART portal. The entire system works on the norms framed by sector skill councils and NSDC and QCI has no control over it , he added.