Wrong targets: Modi govt skills training programme wasted public funds

Govt has been unable to meet its annual targets for any but one of the past 5 years

India’s goal of skilling 400 million people under the National Skills Development Programme 2015 is too large, unnecessary and unattainable, a government-appointed committee has found.

The previous goal of skilling 500 million people, set in 2009 under the National Policy on Skill Development, was also fixed without any basis, the report by the Committee for Rationalization & Optimization of the Functioning of the Sector Skill Councils (SSCs), issued April 25, 2017, said. SSCs are autonomous, industry-led, sector-specific skill builders that ensure skills training meets employer needs.

The government has missed its skills training targets for each except one of the last five years, official data show.

Why ‘Skill India’

About 64% of India’s population is expected to be in the working age group of 15-59 years by 2026, according to Ernst and Young, a professional services consultancy. India is expected to have the largest workforce in the world by 2025, with an estimated 2 billion English-speaking people by the end of 2020.

By the same year, the world is expected to face a shortage of 56.5 million skilled workers, while India is projected to have a surplus of 47 million, Indian government statistics say.

Yet, 30% of India’s youth are neither employed nor in education or training, Bloomberg reported on July 7, 2017. Unless employed gainfully, India’s “demographic dividend” can turn into a socio-economic nightmare.

For instance, 4.69% of India’s workforce is formally skilled, as against 52% in the USA, 68% in the UK, 75% in Germany, 80% in Japan and 96% in South Korea. In fellow emerging economy China, skilled workers account for 24% of the workforce.

This is noteworthy because the largest contributor to India’s economy, the services sector, requires highly-skilled workers. Manufacturing, which the government is seeking to boost through its Make in India initiative, also needs trained workers.

To address this imperative, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Skill India programme on World Youth Skills Day on July 15, 2015, announcing the aim to skill 402 million people by 2022.

The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE)’s estimate for the number of people who needed skills training was more modest–126.87 million people in 34 sectors across industries by 2022, its Annual Report 2016-17 said. Of these, the top 10 sectors would account for 80% of the total requirement, it was estimated.

 

Source: Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Annual Report 2016-17

 

Even as India struggles to provide basic skills to millions of potential job-seekers, it needs to address the challenge of automation and prepare to impart skills for jobs where humans will not be replaced by robots or algorithms.

No less than 69% of Indian jobs are susceptible to automation, the labour ministry told the Lok Sabha on March 27, 2017.

Automation is already affecting the manufacturing and engineering sectors; factory jobs are more vulnerable to automation than those in the IT companies, The Economic Times reported on June 28, 2017.

Government steps in

Mindful of the challenge, India issued a National Policy on Skill Development in 2009 with the aim of skilling 500 million people by 2022.

The 2015 National Policy for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship issued subsequently estimated the need to skill 402 million people over the next seven years—to train 104 million fresh entrants and re-skill/up-skill the existing 298 million farm and non-farm sector workforce.

However, the government has been unable to meet its annual targets–set by various ministries and departments–for any but one of the last five years.

 

Source: National Skill Development Agency; Annual Report 2016-17

NOTE: *Figures upto December 2016; Achievement data for various ministries is not available for 2016-17.

 

The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) achieved 58% of its total skills training target in 2015-16, while the remaining 19 ministries together met 42%, the committee which studied SSCs reported.

Key ministries responsible for sizeable employment generation such as human resources development, textiles, commerce and industry, and tourism have not been allocated the work of skill development, the report found. “Some ministries have been allocated role of ‘employment generation’ which, ipso facto, doesn’t mean that they will do skill development also,” the report said.

The report pointed out numerous shortcomings in India’s vocational education and training systems, including: absence of nation-wide Vocational Education and Training (VET) standards, lack of an integrated on-site apprenticeship training, inadequate industry interface, insufficient financing of the VET system, scarce training capacity, poor quality outcomes, and shortage of qualified trainers.

It found that many ministries imparting skills training are short of infrastructure and qualified trainers, and hence impart substandard training.

SSCs, which are responsible for developing and conducting programmes as well as assessing trainees, were themselves established randomly, the committee found. One of the criteria for establishing an SSC–that a sector have 1 million existing workforce–was itself not strictly followed. For instance, the Media and Entertainment SSC was created despite employing 400,000 people in 2013. The data used by the National Skills Development Council, which oversees SSCs, were based on a study “whose authenticity was difficult to establish,” the report said, adding that setting up of SSCs created “confusion and mess” instead of resolving any issues.

There are about 40 SSCs covering high-growth sectors such as automotives, retail, healthcare, leather and food processing, and informal sectors such as beauty and wellness, security, domestic work and plumbing.

Targets were overblown, loans went unpaid

The committee said SSCs proposed “huge physical targets” of training and certifying institutions and people–both trainees and trainers–on an “arbitrary basis,” without formulating a sectoral labour market information system and sectoral skill development plan.

Fund allocation to SSCs was based on achievement of these targets. Representatives of many SSCs told the committee that these high targets were allocated arbitrarily by the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC), and SSCs were told to sign on the dotted lines so as to claim funding.

As a result, the quality of training, assessment and certification suffered even as targets were shown to have been achieved, the report noted.

The NSDC was set up in 2008 as a public-private organization to generate skilled manpower. It gave soft loans, equity and grants to private-sector training partners.

Many of its initial loans of around Rs 1,500–nearly equivalent to the cost of setting up an Indian Institute of Technology (Rs 1,748 crore)–were not paid back.

 

 

Training Centres Suspended Under PMKVY (2015-16)
Sr. No.	Training Partner	Center Name	Location	Date of Suspension	Reasons of Suspension
1	Skills Academy	Expert Solutions Institute	Sehore, MadhyaPradesh	12th Mar 16	Fake enrolmentsCenter did not exist at the SDMS Address
2	All India Technical & Management Council (AITMC)	AITMC Chhattisgarh	Durg, Chhattisgarh	16th May 16	Fake enrolments Non-adherence to PMKVY branding guidelines Non-Availability of Training Documentation
3	IIMT Engineering College	IIMT Engineering College	Meerut, Uttar Pradesh	16th May 16	Fake enrolments Mass enrolments
4	Innovision Ltd	Innovision Training Centre	Durg, Chhattisgarh	16th May 16	Fake enrolments Non-adherence to PMKVY branding guidelines Non-Availability of Training Documentation
5	Innovision Ltd	Innovision Training Centre	Durg, Chhattisgarh	16th May 16	Fake enrolments Non-adherence to PMKVY branding guidelines Non-Availability of Training Documentation
6	Centum Workskills India Ltd	PMKVY -Lead Academy	Durg, Chhattisgarh	16th May 16	Mass Enrolments Non-adherence to PMKVY branding guidelines
7	GRAS Education and Training Services Private Ltd	GRASAcademy -Gaya Bihar	Gaya, Bihar	16th May 16	Fake enrolments and Fake attendance sheet Trainers was not aware of PMKVY guidelines
8	GRAS Education and Training Services Private Ltd	Paliganj Patna	Patna, Bihar	16th May 16	Fake enrolments Trainer was not aware of PMKVY guidelines
9	AISECT Skill Mission Society	AISECT Training Center-G265	Mehsana, Gujarat	16th May 16	Fake enrolments
10	AISECT Skill Mission Society	AISECT Training Center-G322	Mehsana, Gujarat	16th May 16	Fake enrolments
11	Aspire Knowledge and Skills	Aspire Knowledge and Skills -ChinchawadPune	Pune, Maharastra	16th May 16	Mass Enrolments Non-adherence to PMKVY branding guidelines

Source: Lok Sabha

 

Nearly 40% of the enrolled trainees in skill development centres in three states—Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan—are ghost entries, the Hindustan Times reported on June 29, 2017. Following this, the ministry suspended allocation of new centres in these states, the report said.

Not enough trainers

The committee report highlighted that many ministries lack training infrastructure and impart substandard training. Some of the short-term courses offered are as short as eight hours and neither meet the skills needs of employers nor provide decent livelihood opportunities.

“The NSDC and SSCs made a mockery of trainers training by giving fresh diploma and engineering graduates 2-5 day training to become a qualified trainer,” the report said.

India needs to train 20,000 skills trainers of various kinds every year, but currently has a capacity to produce 8,268, the committee reported, suggesting that trainers’ selection criteria include basic entry qualification, pedagogy skills and minimum six months’ industry experience.

The way forward

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of making India the “skills capital of the world” seems a long way off. The committee has suggested a framework, though: “If we take it up as a national goal we can transform India into a developed country by 2040 and make it the “Skills capital of the world.”

One of its key recommendations is implementation of ‘Reimbursable Industry Contribution’–2% of industry’s annual wage bill be collected to create the corpus for a National Skill Development Fund. Small, medium, large public and private enterprises employing 10 or more workers contribute to promote in-firm training as per industry’s own requirement. The employers manage this fund through SSCs, with their costs reimbursed depending on their annual training plans and performance.

“With this effort, the enterprises will be able to train youth according to their requirement, and over a period of time, we can think of an India, which will have 100% skilled manpower,” the report said.

(Mallapur is an analyst with IndiaSpend.)

Reprinted with permission from IndiaSpend.org, a data-driven, public-interest journalism non-profit organisation. You can read the original article here