The performance in terms of placement is poor in Karnataka under the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana (DDU-GKY), a demand-driven, placement-linked skill development scheme by the Union Ministry of Rural Development, said a report of the Karnataka Evaluation Authority (KEA).
The KEA, which evaluated the performance of the scheme from 2014–15 to 2018–19, said the average placement rate during the five-year period had been 36.68%, “which is far below the minimum placement of 70% envisaged by the scheme guidelines and is also below the overall national placement rate”.
The scheme is aimed at providing poor rural youth with knowledge, attitude, and skills required to access jobs in the formal sector, with regular monthly wages above the minimum wage. The scheme was being implemented by the Department of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship and Livelihood. The project implementation agencies provide skill development training and placements.
Many graduates
Only 7,800 people in the State received training against the country’s figure of 2,37,931 in 2018–19, said the KEA report. The survey conducted from a sample of 2,687 beneficiaries across 12 districts revealed 39.77% of them were graduates, which implied that the scheme was benefiting the educated unemployed. Only 1.64% of the beneficiaries had no formal education.
Less than 50% of the beneficiaries (48.83%) were in continuous employment for three months after training. The high performance districts under this parameter were Kodagu, Uttara Kannada, Mandya, and Bengaluru Urban and the low performers were Davangere, Bidar, Yadgir, and Bagalkot, the report said.
About 70% of female and 63.42% of male beneficiaries had resigned from the placement/first job owing to low salary and inconvenient location of placement. Overall, only about 42% of the beneficiaries were continuously employed in the first year after training.
Low wages
The average monthly salary of placement job/other first job post training was ₹8,136.45, which was lower than even the minimum wage for unskilled labour, the study said.
Though the most common aspiration of beneficiaries was to start their own business/home-based job (25.48%), DDU-GKY has no self-employment course. A majority (53.37%) of beneficiaries are currently unemployed, which raised questions on the sustainability of the employment provided under the scheme, the KEA said. Lack of informed choice of the trade to undergo training, low quality of counselling, restrictive selection of courses were other major reasons for low success of the scheme, it said. The State offered only about one-tenth of the courses offered at the national level.
