New Delhi : Skills is a niche domain, which requires a different level of understanding about the related issues, minister of state for skill development and entrepreneurship Ananth Kumar Hegde. Minsitry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship is working on setting up a separate cadre for skills on lines of IAS, IFS or IRS under its Indian Skill Development Service (ISDS), says Honorable Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Ananth Kumar Hegde at Mail Today’s Skills and Entrepreneurship Summit.
The Centre is in talks with the West Bengal government to set up a training centre for the field in the state, he added. Noting that around 1.96 crore people in the country require jobs every year, Hegde outlined the various steps taken by his ministry to meet the demand.
He shared that his ministry is proactively working to establish 4 Indian Institute of Skills (IIS) on lines similar to the IITs and IIMs. These institutions of national repute will be come up in 2018 at Kanpur, Mumbai, Bhubaneswar and Bengaluru
The Centre is also considering to collaborate with state governments to replicate Haryana and Rajasthan type PPP modeled Skill Universities concept to another states all over India.
While speaking about the need based creation of skilled workforce, he spoke about the World Bank funded project SANKALP (Skills Acquisition and Knowledge Awareness for Livelihood Promotion) project, through which his ministry has initiated to provide assistance to the state governments to do skill-gap analysis in their states.
“This will be used as inputs for all our skill development initiatives.” It is a project to identify which skill is in most demand in a particular state, and align infrastructure and training capabilities towards that skill to limit migration of the youth, he said.
Recently approved by Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Sankalp is Rs 4,455 crore centrally sponsored project including Rs 3,300 crore support from the World Bank.
For instance, if a particular state is found to have demand for automobile training, but have jobs in agriculture, there is a mismatch.
If you want youth to stay back, then you have to train them in skills that are in hugely in demand so that when they complete their vocational training, they can be easily employed in the state. The project will identify the demand in each state and train the youngsters there accordingly, he added.
India International Skill Centers
Further, the union minister said, 14 India International Skill Centres (IISCs) have been set up where people are trained in new-age technology that will help them find employment abroad.
The skills offered are based on what is in demand in, say, Canada or the Middle East, and based on international standards. For this, the ministry is partnering with the countries and international organisations to bring in their technology and state-of-theart infrastructure to India, he added.
The government aims to train over 30,000 aspirants in these IISCs over the next six years and get certificates from international awarding bodies. However, Hegde said, while skilling can be offered, people’s attitude and perception towards vocational training has to be changed for any real impact.
Dignity of labour is important and vocational training should not be looked down upon, he said.
“A plumber is called hydrologist in Germany. A simple change in nomenclature can make such a difference. Nazar badlega to nazariya bhi badlega. We Indians have all the necessary skills. They just require some polishing and fine-tuning.” Dignity with skill should be the focus, he added.
The minister also said there was a plan to introduce ‘Recognition of Prior Learning’ certification to illiterates, where skills will be certified as equivalent to a certain class so that if they wished to study further, they can join directly.
