Hon’ble President Pranab Mukherjee inaugurated the India Skills Competition here at Vigyan Bhavan, New Delhi on the occasion of the World Youth Skills Day.
Mukherjee said that India is a young nation with 62 percent of its population in the working age group and more than 54 percent of the total population below 25 years of age, and “young minds are India’s assets”.
“This is our demographic dividend which we need to harness. As policy makers, we have a duty to empower our youth by providing skills to them. We need to seize this opportunity,” he said in a statement. The Hon’ble President also launched a single window platform to aggregate supply and demand trends in the Indian skill development ecosystem, referred to as the National Labour Market Information System (LMIS) – www.lmis.gov.in
Another initiative of the Ministry leveraging technology to reach millions of skill seekers, the President announced the launch of IndiaSkills Online (www.indiaskillsonline.com), an online platform for learning skills of choice.
He, however, cautioned that if they cannot provide jobs to the huge number of people entering the job market every year, the population dividend could turn into a population liability and this explosive situation has to be prevented.
The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) was created by Narendra Modi government in 2014. Underlining that Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) is “extremely important” for India’s socio-economic development of India, President Pranab Mukherjee on Friday congratulated it for its achievements in a short span of time.
