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The National Skill Development Council
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has written to all chief ministers,
asking them to join in, doing two things. One, make available the
buildings of higher educational institutions of the state for skill
development programmes after regular class hours; two, form state level
missions headed by the chief ministers themselves to co-ordinate the
efforts of different government departments and agencies as well as
involve local experts and representatives of different skill sectors.
The letter went last Saturday. High-minded exhortation goes only so
far. The Centre knows this. So, out of the Rs 275,000-crore allocation
for education in the Eleventh Plan (five times as much as in the Tenth
Plan), Rs 31,000 crore has been allocated to skill development. States
can hope to tap into these funds, to convert unemployable youth into
productive workers. This is not all. The finance ministry has promoted
a National Skill Development Corporation as a not-for-profit company.
This, too, will channel funds to assorted skill development activities
across the country.But skill development is not a homogeneous activity.
The shortage of a million nurses cannot be met by the efforts of those
whose job is to train lathe operators or by computer-animators.
Different sectors, different ministries, different companies and
voluntary agencies must get involved, pool resources, dovetail
activities into a shared operating infrastructure. Hence, the
importance of the third skills body set up by the Centre, in addition
to the PM’s council and the corporation: the National Skill Development
Co-ordination Board, to be co-ordinated by the Planning Commission, and
the proposed missions at the state level. Myriad ways of promoting
skills have to be innovated, to meet the requirements of each sector,
each state, each region’s degree of development. These cannot be laid
down in any central blueprint. But the commitment of the political
class, when combined with private initiative and administrative skills
of the bureaucracy, can make skill development actually happen on the
scale envisaged.The skills development council has proposed two key
principles that would ensure that the skills training undertaken would,
indeed, be effective. One is to funnel the funding to the trainee,
rather than to the training institution. Training institutions would
have to compete to attract would-be trainees endowed with
scholarships/loans/vouchers/company sponsorships. Such competition
would ensure the quality of delivery. The other idea is bankability of
the training.Various other ideas yet to be crystallised into policy
include giving tax breaks for sponsoring skillstraining — much like
those available now for one’s own children’s education.The scheme is
getting launched at the fag end of the present government’s term. It
can succeed only if the political class understands the urgent
imperative of upgrading skills of India’s large and growing young
population, the largest for any country in the world. If they are
empowered with knowledge and skills, they will power not just the
Indian economy but the entire world. If they remain unschooled and
unskilled, social violence and morbidity would choke off the potential
of even the minority that does manage to get a decent education.
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