The government, in a bid to bolster the impact of the Skill India mission, is mapping the country’s existing training infrastructure, including thousands of private training institutes that are thriving but do not reflect in the official data.
New enterprise- and household-level statistical surveys to be conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) would now glean details about training institutions, their capacities for imparting different skill sets and their utilisation by young job market aspirants.
The government runs about 12,000 industrial training institutes and has direct access to data on their operations and outcomes, but that information is inadequate to assess the actual training capacity in the country, said a senior official in the National Skill Development Agency (NSDA).
“Skill development capacities created through government funded programmes is only a part of the story. The capacity created by private investment is unknown,” said the official.
The NSDA, an arm of the skill development and entrepreneurship ministry, had requested the NSSO under the statistics ministry to incorporate new questions to capture these details into their household and enterprise surveys.
“Once this is done the shortfall in capacity can be gauged and a plan for bridging the gap can be formulated and implemented,” the official said. He said there was a need for creating an inventory of skilling sets.
In July, while launching the Skill India Mission, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India would be the biggest supplier of workforce to the world in the coming years as it had a huge pool of people who were young.
“We should not just map the demand for human resources in India but also globally, and gear up to meet that demand,” Mr. Modi said.
