ITIs: Back to the centre stage

Established to skill displaced people in post-Independence India, ITIs have now become central to the government's job creation strategy, despite a history of underwhelming performance

Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) have rarely made it to the Union Budget speech, but this time things were different. In her July 23 speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman put “employment and skilling” second on her list of nine Budget priorities, just after agriculture. The upgrade of ITIs and a slew of job creation schemes through various collaborations formed the core of the “employment and skilling” theme, making this Budget markedly different from the rest.

It’s perhaps a matter of chance that ITIs, which were started soon after India’s independence as a way to create employment, are being brought