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Skilling India

By Swati Deshpande,

Added 21 April 2017

Find out what the industry thinks about the availability of the skilled labour and how far ‘Skill India’ can be a solution to it.

Elaborating on the same, Sabarinath Nair, Founder & CEO, Skillveri says, "Skill India is one of India's most important programs, because it is critical to the success of another flagship program - Make in India. On one hand we have a shortage of skilled workers, and on the other, there is an abundance of unskilled workers, leading at times to poor quality output and high attrition. Skill India has the potential to bridge this gap, by ensuring the availability of a skilled workforce with a trusted skill-score, such as a GRE score for all hand-skills. Additionally, by demonstrating the growth that an industry can achieve by employing a skilled workforce, an ecosystem of rewarding better skills with better pay will emerge, making it aspirational to acquire better skills."

"It is an ambitious project and a necessity for our country which faces a challenge of huge labour surplus by 2022. The government is also taking various initiatives under the scheme like skill loan or skill development in rural India to name a few. We believe that the framework adopted to achieve this humungous task is quite adequate and it can give great results if it is executed in the same vigour as envisaged by our honourable prime minister. However, we cannot burden the complete onus on to the government schemes only. It is time, where the corporates take a proactive approach in training the youth. Corporates need to play a strategic role, amalgamate with academia to adopt and nurture education setups. We at Godrej too believe in the philosophy and have taken an aim to skill 1 million youths ourselves by 2020," says Shariyarr.

Adding to it Dr. Goel mentions, "The Government of India's ‘Skill Development' program is the right approach. It focuses on the essential elements to take manufacturing in India to a few notches above. The manufacturing industry will be highly benefitted to meet the international standards with better quality outputs and meeting deadlines."

Elaborating on various schemes launched by the government of India in this regard Jain mentioned, "Skill India Program, Pradhan Mantri Kausha VikasYojana (PMKVY) 2016 - 2020, initiated by Prime Minister is a very constructive step in the direction of skilling the young India. This Scheme is being implemented through Public-Private and Public-Public partnerships. National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) is the implementing agency for this Scheme. It is proposed to also involve the State Governments through a project based approach under PMKVY. This collaboration should ideally lead to inclusive growth especially for those at the bottom of the pyramid (approximately 800 million citizens). Under this program, 290 Training Partners have already come together with 4,526 Training Centres and many more are coming up, to provide good skilled workforce."

"Skill India Program is designed to address the gaps in skills that I mentioned before, both in terms of quantity and quality. Various sectorial councils - such as the Automotive Skill Development Council, ASDC - have done tremendous work in standardising the skills required for each job and the criteria for assessing levels of those skills. The National Occupational Standards created for this purpose have been the result of a collaborative work by all the concerned stakeholders, and hence are very valuable assets in meeting the skill-gap challenge. Unfortunately, many manufacturers are not aware of this work, and do not value the certificates issued by these councils. People who have cleared council's examinations are not considered on par with others who have passed NCVT approved programs, such as ITI's. If this gap is closed through a widespread communication, sectorial councils in alliance with able skill imparting partners and qualified assessing bodies can play a wonderful role in creating and then matchmaking the right talent with the industry," points out Kapur

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