 "Turning the tide")
India is a young country with half its population aged below 25. The workforce comprises 47.3 crore or about 38 per cent of the population. Unemployment has hovered around five-nine per cent in the last two decades. Currently, it stands at around five per cent.
Considering that Indian policymakers are riding on demographic dividends in the coming years, challenges relating to skills and employment need to be addressed on a priority basis and in a sustained manner. Alarmingly, however, less than two per cent of the workforce is equipped with some form of technical education and 82 per cent is in the unorganised sector where career growth, health benefits and quality working conditions have been a challenge.
Some of the challenges regarding unemployment include information asymmetry between job seekers and employers, inadequate counselling services, lack of aptitude-based assessments, inefficient employment services and archaic, ineffective legal provisions.
India's demographic advantage gives it a large pool of young population that is a necessity for propelling economic growth. But if the benefits of demographic dividends have to be reaped they must be supplemented with skilling programmes to address unemployment. A policy intervention is also essential to strengthen the platforms available for bridging the gap among stakeholders so that responsive, transparent and efficient career services can be provided, especially to the youth.
While several positive steps have been undertaken by central ministries and state governments to impart skilling and employment services, and a dedicated skill development and entrepreneurship ministry has been created to leverage synergies between these programmes, there is a need to provide a single-window, convenient access to job seekers. In addition, a new outlook of transitioning from employment to career must be brought in.
An important development in this space is the launch of the National Career Service (NCS), which envisions working with all government departments and the corporate sector to develop the career-market ecosystem through a series of structured interventions. It proposes establishing career centres nationwide to standardise the set of services being offered.
NCS is partnering state governments, educational institutions, industrial clusters and citizen service providers to ensure last-mile reach of these services. Success of these centres will act as a replication model for state governments to transform the entire network.
The stakeholder group of government agencies, private sector, associations and NGOs must contribute in the programme across all aspects such as capacity building, skill-wise mapping and bridging employability gap to make a fruitful impact on the beneficiaries.
The programme is being rolled out for job seekers, employers, etc. The government has identified a number of facilitation such as developing an IT platform for knowledge management, online registration, credential verification and matching jobs; making available necessary tools such as aptitude assessment; building capacity of counsellors and other personnel; setting up a national resource centre with research, standards and new ideas; and mapping skills for demand and supply management.
The ministry of labour and employment is firming up steps for an action plan of the programme that would include working with vendors for an IT platform and a knowledge repository for counselling, and exploring avenues to encourage micro-entrepreneurship.
It is also interacting with stakeholders like industry associations (Ficci, CII, Assocham), academia (UGC, NCERT, universities and other leading institutions like IIMs), research institutions, examination bodies, central ministries and state governments on a regular basis to further the use of the NCS portal and bring in more employers. This will ensure that NCS offers value to all users and is able to fulfill the needs comprehensively.
It is worth mentioning that in the past, the ministry also leveraged MyGov, a powerful medium of citizen participation in governance, for crowdsourcing of ideas and suggestions for the career services programme. MyGov users were also suggested to visit employment exchanges near their homes and report existing on-ground conditions, problems, quality of job seeker experience and suggest possible solutions.
One of the major success parameters for effectiveness of this initiative will be the number of youth who are connected to jobs according to their potential, and those who receive quality counselling and cross over from unskilled and unemployed to skilled and employed. This can be facilitated by active participation from ministries having high employment potential like micro, small and medium enterprises, department of industrial policy and promotion and textiles.
Sector skill councils for areas such as construction, textile, agribusiness and manufacturing also need to constantly provide feedback on job opportunities, skills forecast, and regional demands, thus enabling counsellors to provide meaningful guidance to aspirants.
The NCS team is actively listening to feedback on social media channels and strives to improve its service.
Shalina Bhatia
Principal consultant, Government and public sector, PwC India
Amit Singh
Associate director, Government and public sector, PwC India
