Yesterday (July 15), which also happened to be World Youth Skills Day, the Skill India Mission celebrated its second anniversary. The mission was the Modi government’s answer to the problem of picking up yet another idea floated by the previous UPA government and making it its own.
The Manmohan Singh government had first floated the National Skill Development Council, headed by former TCS honcho S. Ramadorai. It had even given him the rank of a Cabinet Minister. Under the council, the National Skill Development Corporation was set up as a public-private partnership (another first). And the corporation came up with a target — for itself and some 22 Central Ministries which already had some form of skill development or training programme running. With an objective of skilling 500 million people by 2022, this would have made India’s initiative the biggest such exercise in human history.
Targets unmet
That number, arrived at from very poor data and deeply flawed assumptions, was soon quietly dropped. During the UPA years itself, the NSDC scaled back the target to a humble 10 million by 2020, even as the Centre upped the project to the status of a ‘mission’.
Post 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, one of whose poll promises was to create one crore jobs, stepped up the ante. First, the skill development portfolio was upped to the status of a full-fledged Ministry, with its own Minister, Secretary et al. A year later, he revamped the National Skills Mission. A special scheme, with the PM’s own imprimatur on it — the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) — was launched, with the status of a ‘flagship scheme’, which meant adequate budgetary support. With all this, and with the Modi government’s focus on execution, one would have thought that we would have been well on the way to achieving, if not the UPA’s initial, hyperbolic targets, at least part of the more realistic targets set later.
Unfortunately, such tectonic shifts in a short period of time, particularly when involving staggeringly large numbers of people, have been managed by only one country in the world — and that’s not India, but China. Two years on, India’s ambitious plan of becoming the world’s supplier of skilled workers lies in tatters. Now, the Ministry does not give a number even if asked.
With many of the initial loans doled out by the NSDC turning into NPAs, the franchisee model (remember public-private partnership) appears to have been quietly buried.
With more skeletons tumbling out of the skilling closet every day, the PMKVY scheme’s expansion has been put on a ‘temporary’ hold, while the Ministry struggles to separate the genuine from the fake. Originally started with a corpus of ₹1,600 crore, which was quickly upped to ₹6,000 crore, the PMKVY, as per the Skill Development Ministry’s own investigations, appears to have turned into a gigantic racket for milking state funds. This is what the Ministry said, while stopping any further allocation to any franchisee: “On a further scrutiny of franchise arrangements in these centres it has been found that the core function of training itself including entire infrastructure has been outsourced in majority of places with a rent-seeking attitude of key training provider who tends to charge up to 40% of revenue, just for providing the access to PMKVY system through this arrangement. This is obviously having a deleterious impact on the quality of training in many of these institutes.” In fact, a sample survey showed that nearly half the franchise skilling centres did not meet the basic criteria. A Ministry internal audit showed racketeers had gone a step further, creating ‘ghost’ centres which existed only on paper. This is a huge tragedy, particularly for the millions of job seekers joining the workforce every year. The official website of the PM itself paints this stark picture: “Just 4.69% of India’s total workforce has undergone formal skill training, compared with 52% in the U.S., 75% in Germany, 80% in Japan and 96% in South Korea.”
Spectre of jobless growth
Of course, with the spectre of ‘jobless growth’ haunting the economy, even those who are being skilled (or reskilled) are finding it difficult to get jobs. Numbers are hard to come by, but estimates range from a low of 5% placement under PMKVY to under-50% in some of the older schemes, where funding is linked to outcomes. Now the PMKVY is also being modified to a partially outcome-based funding model. But all this is a case of too little, too late. India has clearly dropped the ball on skill development. And with the youthful population (India’s median age is just 29) nursing ever-growing aspirations, finding jobs — well-paid, aspiration-fulfilling jobs — for this population has to become the government’s main priority. Merely creating a Ministry, and coming out with vision and mission documents is not enough — it has to be at the very centre of everything the government plans and does for the economy.
Otherwise, we are in trouble.
