Mind the Gap

If India wants to become a $5 trillion economy, plugging the skill gap of its working population needs to be taken up on a war footing

Government-funded schemes like PMKVY have cannibalised the feebased market of superior industry-led skilling -JAYANT KRISHNA Former CEO & COO, National Skill Development Corporation

PRESENTING THE IN TERIM BUDGET FOR 2024 25 ON FEBRUARY 1, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman reeled out some big numbers to highlight the impact of the National Skill Development Mission (NSDM) launched in 2015—14 million youths skilled, another 5.4 million upskilled and reskilled, and the establishment of 3,000 new Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs), the backbone of vocational training in the country. In a rapidly ageing world, India’s demographic dividend is considered to be a boon for its ambitious growth targets. But without the right skills and jobs, India’s advantage of having 65 per cent of its population under the age of 35 years could easily slip away.

So, under the NSDM, skill training is being provided to the youth through various schemes. Among them is the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY)—a short-term training programme of the ministry of skill development and entrepreneurship (MSDE). While the stress is on skill training, data reveals, employability remains an issue. Under PMKVY 2.0, for instance, about 11 million persons were trained between FY17 and FY23 (as of Jan. 5, 2023), but just about 2.14 million, or 20 per cent, of them got placed.

One of the key reasons is the lack of industry-relevant skills offered in the training programmes. In India, the skilling courses are primarily led by the government, which has proved to be counterproductive. “The best people to teach and train,” says Jayant Krishna, former CEO and COO of the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), “are the people who practise.” While subsidised skill training should be available to the poorest of the poor, adds Krishna, intensifying industry’s role in skilling is very important.

No wonder, there is also a skill mismatch for the trained candidates. According to the ‘India Skills Report 2023’ by the online remote proctored testing firm Wheebox, only 50.3 per cent of the 375,000 test-takers across various domains nationally were found to be ‘extremely employable’. There is a need for a “paradigm shift”, says Nirmal Singh, founder and CEO, Wheebox, as new technologies and jobs look at skills training as a “lifelong process”. ■