Skilling: The way forward

India's youth desire jobs that have prospects for upward mobility, and our skilling schemes must be crafted to meet their aspirations

A well-recognised paradox in our country is that ours is a labour-surplus but skill-shortage economy. At the same time, we do export some skills and professional talent, thereby earning $79 billion in 2018 as foreign remittances. Therefore, skill shortages in some sectors are perhaps more a result of relatively low wages in the domestic economy. In other sectors, these would be a result of supply shortages.

It is evident from the worldwide experience of extensive public sector intervention that given the “public goods” nature of human resources development, a purely market-based skill generation system will be inevitably characterised by supply shortages.