MISSION 2022: SKILL INDIA DRIVE GETS UNDERWAY

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Skill India Mission, another ambitious flagship initiative of his government, to impart job-oriented skills to more than 400 million Indians by 2022.This is, arguably, even more ambitious than all the other big initiatives - such as Make in India, Digital India, the smart cities programme, urban renewal project, etc. - announced by this government over the past 14 months and, in a sense, forms the bedrock of all the other programmes as many of them face major hurdles in finding enough skilled personnel to implement them.The government faces a major challenge in creating sufficient jobs for the estimated one million youngsters who join the country's workforce every month. “Sixty five per cent of our population is less than 35 years old and we need to train them,” Modi said at the launch of the mission in Delhi's Vigyan bhavan.According to a recent EY-Ficci study, the average age of Indians by 2020 will be 29 and this country will have 28 per cent of the global workforce. For many years, this was showcased as the so-called demographic dividend that would take India into a different development orbit by accelerating growth rates, lowering the dependency ratio and propelling entrepreneurship and risk taking on a scale not seen in this country before.But here's a reality check. Only 34 per cent of fresh engineering and management graduates are job ready at the end of their education. This ratio declines rapidly for fresh general stream graduates. Then, there is not enough focus on vocational training in India both from the demand and supply side.For example, the ITIs, which are mandated to impart vocational skills to people, often follow outdated curriculums that do not train their students for jobs that are available. An initiative to allow private industry to adopt individual ITIs as captive training centres has also failed to deliver the expected results.On the demand side, Indian students and their parents still seem to prefer regular graduation courses over vocational training because of the social prestige attached to college and university education even though they don't enhance employment opportunities.The above set of factors has led experts to warn that the promised demographic dividend could easily become a demographic disaster if urgent steps are not taken to bridge the skills gap.This is the goal of the Skill India Mission. “Matching job creation with industry demand is the key to ending employment... Skill development should focus on value addition. Training and curriculum should be relevant or else it is useless,” the Prime Minister said. For this, there is need for regular interaction between industry, academia and technology experts.“If China can be manufacturing centre of the world, then India can be the human capital centre of the world... Over the next decade, we will have 45 million surplus manpower,” he added and proposed making India the supplier of skilled labour across the world, which will face a shortage of the same.Asserting that the foremost priority of the government is to create jobs, Modi said the skills initiative is another step in that direction.Earlier, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley put the programme in perspective by saying: “we have to convert our surplus manpower into a resource.”