Tag: skill training

India’s Demographic Dividend Can’t Become a Lost Cause

Rather than treating youth as a lost case, we must recognise their strengths and build upon them.

There is a lot of emphasis on skill training for young people in the country, to the extent that many lay the major blame of unemployment on lack of adequate skills, often erroneously. Policy emphasis is also on skill training programmes including apprenticeships and internships. Irrespective of the understanding of the role of skills in the current employment problem in the country, there would be a consensus on the importance of basic school education, literacy and arithmetic skills for all, as the pre-requisite. Any agenda for skill training must also build on what the status of these basic skills are. A recent report of the NSS – Comprehensive Annual Modular Survey, 2022-2023 – presents some interesting data.

The youth in India are a literate population with 96% of those in the age group of 15-29 years being “able to read and write short simple statements in their everyday life with understanding and also able to perform simple arithmetic calculations” (97.4% male and 94.4% female). The corresponding figure all those above 15 years of age is only 81.2%, (87.9% male and 74.2% female). Therefore, there has been a considerable improvement in basic literacy as well as an impressive narrowing of the gender gap. Only 2% of those in the age group of 6 to 18 years have never been enrolled in formal education. While we continue to focus attention on improving the quality of education, the success of the Right to Education Act, 2009, and other initiatives in brining children to school must be recognised. 

One worrying aspect in the report is that it finds that only 90% of children in the age group of 6 to 10 years are currently enrolled in school and 10% are out of school. This is not a small number considering that universal school enrolment has been a goal in India right from the beginning and it has now been 15 years since the passage of the Right to Education Act (which makes education free and compulsory for all children in the age group of 6 to 14). There is no merit in getting into semantics of whether these children are “never enrolled” or “dropouts” – the point is that they are currently not in school and that is a violation of their right to education. 

In terms of school completion as well, some gaps remain. The mean years of schooling for the age group 15 and above is 8.4, higher than 7.5 for those 25 and above (including time spent in preschool education). Amongst those aged above 25 years only 38.6% (46.2% male and 31.0% female) have secondary education (pass class X or higher). On the other hand, among all graduates in the age group of 21-35 years, 37.8% graduated in science and technology (42% male and 32.5% female). 

A high proportion – about half the youth in the age group of 15-24 years were in some form of formal/informal training in the 12 months preceding the survey (50.8% male and 47.1% female). However, almost a quarter (23.3%) of youth are not in education, employment or training (NEET) and the gender gap here is very high – 38.2% female and 9.9% male. Issues related to mobility and transport facilities, safety and other restrictions are much more for women in this age group. Further, the care and domestic work burdens are also high with many of them being married. According to NFHS-5 data (as provided in the Youth in India, 2022 report of the Government of India), 61.4% women are married by age 21 and 83% by age 25. 

Also read: Accountability Vacuum: In India, Inequality Reigns, Jobs Vanish, and Citizens Are on Their Own

Interestingly the mobile, internet and basic ICT skills are quite high among young men and women. 96.4% of those in the age group of 15 – 29 years can use mobiles, including smartphones and 94.2% used a mobile phone with an active sim card in the last three months (96.4% male and 91.8% female). 84.2% are able to use the internet (89.2% male and 78.8% female) and 77.7% “reported execution of skill of sending messages (e.g., e-mail, messaging service, SMS) with attached files (e.g. documents, pictures, and video)” (83.8% male and 71.1% female). A smaller but significant proportion ‘reported execution of skill of copy and paste tools to duplicate or move data, information, documents, etc.’ – 70.2% of those in the age group of 15 – 29 (76.8% male and 63% female) – about two-thirds are able to search for information on the internet and half can send or receive emails. 

There are gender gaps in many of these indicators, and also a variation between rural and urban areas. There are also issues of poor learning outcomes shown by ASER and other surveys. The youth seem to be struggling with gaining skills which they think are suitable for the market, such as English-speaking and more digital literacy. They have very little access to libraries or resource centres and even the education they have managed to attain is in spite of huge shortages of teachers, classrooms and textbooks. 

The data discussed so far show that young people are trying to make the best of the opportunities is available for them in the face of all odds. Many of these young people are first generation literates whose parents made immense sacrifices to keep them in school and attain higher education. Field experiences across the country are replete with examples of poor parents working hard depriving themselves of even basic comforts to ensure that their children, both girls and boys, study and complete their education. One often hears parents saying that all they want is for their children not to become like them. It is unfortunate that despite all their efforts, what these parents are now faced with is indebtedness and adult children struggling with unemployment. 

If India is not able to take advantage of its demographic dividend it is because the state and society have failed to create the enabling conditions for them to be gainfully employed and contribute productively to the economy. Rather than treating youth as a lost case, we must recognise their strengths and build upon them. It is for policy and politics to figure out how we can use this resource better and do justice to the country as well as it’s youth. 

Dipa Sinha is a development economist.

Improving Apprenticeships Can Create Jobs. But First We Need More of Them.

If governments wish to raise employment levels in formal sector enterprises and prepare school leavers for the world of work, it is critical that systems of internships and apprenticeships, formally approved and mandated, are encouraged. 

In the vast majority of low-income and middle-income countries (LICs/MICs), most students at the secondary/higher secondary level are engaged in general academic education, not vocational education or training.

For such students, the transition to the world of work is usually traumatic. Most end up working in informal enterprises where they acquire some vocational skill informally, with no certification. The global average for the share of informal employment in total employment is 61%; in India, it is 91%, with nearly as high a share of unorganised enterprises.

In advanced economies, the go-to mechanism to prepare youth for entering the workforce has been apprenticeship, especially with formal enterprises. In the absence of large-scale opportunities for formal apprenticeships, the new secondary school leavers in LICs and MICs end up in informal apprenticeships.

If governments wish to raise employment levels in formal sector enterprises and prepare school leavers for the world of work, it is critical that systems of internships and apprenticeships – formally approved and mandated – are encouraged. 

The case of India

India’s workforce is the second largest in the world, after China’s. However, less than 5% of this workforce has formally acquired vocational education and training. What’s more, even when combined with those who have acquired informal vocational training, the workforce share of people with any training does not exceed 10% (though in the non-farm sector, this figure is 20% and that of the industrial workforce 44%).

No formal firm, whether in industry or modern services, will employ such poorly educated workers in their enterprises.

Formal apprenticeships have historically been provided in India in accordance with the Apprenticeship Act, 1961. However, until 2011, there were fewer than 250,000 apprentices in the formal sector.

The 2014 amendments to the Act require all establishments (units/employers) that have a workforce (regular employees as well as contract labour) of 30 or more workers to have apprentices constitute between 2.5%-15% of this workforce. For establishments with 4-29 workers, this is optional; which is itself problematic as it legitimises informal apprenticeships.

Despite the small scale of formal apprenticeships among the Indian workforce, a yet-to-be-published International Labour Organisation (ILO) study indicates that in India, more than 90% of registered apprentices complete the apprenticeship they undertake; 66% get placed within six months and 81% within 12 months of completing the course, which is much higher than any other form of skill training. 

Clearly, apprenticeship is a good way to make young school leavers workforce-ready. This is absolutely critical since 5-6 million youth are joining the labour force each year, looking for work, in addition to the nearly 40 million unemployed in India.

Also read: Is There a Monopoly on Vocational Training in India?

The ILO study finds that although the number of apprentices in India is increasing – it crossed the 500,000 mark in March 2022, given the size of the workforce, the potential capacity of apprentices ranges from 2-2.5 million contracts.

In accordance with the amendments to the Apprenticeship Act, for every 10,000 employed workers, the number of apprentices should be between 250-1,500. However, apprentice intake per 10,000 workers is as low as 7; much lower than Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany, and lower even than Cambodia, South Africa and Senegal.

The biggest problem the implementation of the Act has faced, since its inception, is that registered small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as well as most large private corporates, have not been keen on taking on apprentices. Small enterprises provide employment to millions. Much of the workforce that starts working in the informal sector soon acquires technical skills and then enters the formal labour market. Informal apprenticeships, therefore, can be an effective way to prepare this workforce with appropriate, hands-on skills. 

We suggest here, again, that it is possible to implement, as part of the cluster-development programmes of the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) Ministry, a cluster-based model for apprenticeships and to use recognition of prior learning (RPL) to provide formal apprenticeships to those who have learnt through informal ones. 

A worker operates a lathe machine as he makes a steel cutter at a manufacturing unit in Noida, on the outskirts of New Delhi November 3, 2014. Credit: Reuters/Anindito Mukherjee/FilesA worker operates a lathe machine as he makes a steel cutter at a manufacturing unit in Noida, on the outskirts of New Delhi November 3, 2014. Credit: Reuters/Anindito Mukherjee/Files

A worker operates a lathe machine as he makes a steel cutter at a manufacturing unit in Noida, on the outskirts of New Delhi November 3, 2014. Photo: Reuters/Anindito Mukherjee/Files

Expanded apprenticeship opportunities

The 2014 amendments to the Apprenticeship Act expanded opportunities for early school leavers by opening apprenticeships to:

(i) young persons who completed government-sponsored, short-term skill training open to early school leavers, such as the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) and the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana (DDU-GKY);

(ii) early school-leavers who have not undergone any skill training; and 

(iii) University graduates from any discipline. 

In November 2021, the government approved the inclusion of apprenticeship training to students of general streams, such as those with Bachelor’s degrees in arts, science, commerce, business administration and computer science.

Apprentices under the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) grew exponentially after the apprenticeship reforms; the inclusion of optional trade apprentices as determined by employers (as opposed to trades prescribed by the government); the convergence of apprenticeship with short-term skilling; the formal recognition of the role of intermediaries between the employing establishments and skills training institutions; and the incentivising of both industry and apprentices. 

However, the ILO study notes that only 30,165 establishments currently actively engage apprentices in designated trades. This is insignificant compared to the total establishments in the country (64 million, including formal and informal). Out of these, 36,000 apprentices are in Union government public sector enterprises, and 194,000 are in state government-owned enterprises and the private sector. 

There are about 5 million employees in Union government-owned public sector enterprises, the Union government itself and the public sector banks. If these establishments engage apprentices, even to the mandatory minimum limit of 2.5% of their total workforce, 125,000 new apprentices could be trained. 

Some large corporates have, in recent years, been more forthcoming. Maruti Suzuki India Limited, for instance, has signed MoUs with six Industrial Training Institutes (ITI; which have existed since the early 1950s), offering dual training to students and later absorbing them into its own workforce. 

Also read: RTIs Reveal Modi Govt’s Indifference Towards Unemployment, Apprenticeship

The way forward

It is critical that vocational students have progression pathways from apprenticeship to higher academics. I had argued in my working paper for the Institute of Applied Manpower Research in 2012, the introduction of a national vocational education qualification framework should be used as a basis for introducing greater flexibility within both general academic and vocational coursework, to enable students to pass seamlessly from one stream to the other, and vice versa. Some efforts have recently been made in India towards achieving that objective, but problems remain. 

Similarly, in accordance with a proposal we made 10 years ago, a high-level committee to develop a Unified Credit Accumulation and Transfer Framework for both vocational and general education was constituted in November 2021. This report has been submitted to the government in September 2022.

Other new initiatives are needed. There are 5,500 industry clusters in India; they largely consist of MSMEs. It is now crucial to put a system in place wherein MSME associations/trade or craft associations/etc are made active stakeholders. These local/sectoral/microenterprise associations can aggregate demand, consolidate batches and ensure the organisation of Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) and further apprenticeship training in these clusters. 

Santosh Mehrotra is a research fellow, IZA Institute of Labour Economics, Bonn.

Skill India Now Has a Single Regulator. Will It Succeed Where Other Bodies Have Failed?

Regulation of the skill development industry has been a mess. National Council for Vocational Education and Training, the new entity, should work to cut through the clutter.

The Cabinet recently approved the merger of existing regulatory institutions in the skill development industry – National Council for Vocational Training (NCVT) and National Skill Development Agency (NSDA) – to establish a new National Council for Vocational Education and Training (NCVET).  

This means we now have one regulator in the country instead of multiple. One main lacuna in skill development has been fragmentation of the ecosystem. There is duplication of roles and responsibilities of different agencies.

Also Read: Top-Level Exits at NSDC as Modi’s Skill India Agenda Still Struggles to Make Headway

We have argued in the Sharda Prasad Committee report and elsewhere that there is need for a holistic ‘Vocational Education and Training’ (VET) system across all the five pillars of VET in India:

1) Vocational education in schools and institutes of higher education

2) Vocational education by National Skill Development Corporation’s (NSDC) private vocational training partners (VTPs)

3) Public and private ‘Industrial Training Institutes’

4) ‘In-plant’ training by private companies and

5) The skill development schemes of the Centre’s sixteen ministries. 

While introducing greater coordination, we should work for standards that are not only nationally acceptable but also internationally comparable. The government’s decision to create a single regulator is a welcome step in the right direction. However, its success lies in thoroughly understanding past mistakes.

While introducing greater coordination, we should work for standards that are not only nationally acceptable but also internationally comparable.

Learning from the past

The primary role of the NSDA (created in 2014) has been to anchor and operationalise the National Skills Qualification Framework (NSQF) and to ensure that quality and standards meet sector-specific requirements. The NSDA has not been very effective – not because it did not have statutory powers, but because it never used its powers adequately. Powers were provided to it in the NSQF notification of 2013, but it depended too much on NSDC to implement them.

Meanwhile, the NCVT was set up in 1956, as an advisory body to maintain uniformity in standards of training. NCVT has played an anchor role in curriculum development for short and long-term courses and created norms and standards of schemes (essentially the system of public and private Industrial Training Institutes) under Directorate General of Training (DGT). However, along the way, NCVT was relegated to the background and did not get the recognition it deserved. Finally, it is being closely integrated to its newer counterpart. Hopefully, it will lend its rich experience to the new entity – the National Council for Vocational Education and Training.

One problem of NSDA has been that it functioned through very few regular staff, only a dozen  short-term consultants. What the new NCVET needs is an organisational structure that encourages domain experts with experience of industry (with a training background) and academia to work for it.

NCVET has its task cut out – to provide a strong oversight mechanism for outcomes of Skill India. NSDC’s primary role was and is to incubate private standalone vocational training providers (VTPs) to conduct training of youth through 3-4 month courses. These VTPs  have no role as employers of those they train; herein lies the rub. NSDC (when it was created by the Ministry of Finance in 2010), was and is a Non Banking Financial Company. However, it is exempt from Reserve Bank of India (RBI) oversight on its incorporation, as an exception since the Ministry of Finance then vouched to provide oversight. NSDC must now focus on this key role of raising private sector funding and participation for Skill India programmes,and not be 99% dependent on government funding as it has done in the past.

Also Read: Why is India Inc Reluctant to Participate in the Skill India Campaign?

NCVET should ensure that India now gets private industry (meaning employer) participation through NSDC to help modernise, expand and diversify the courses in all pillars of the skill ecosystem (mentioned earlier) and ensure quality in the vocational training providers so that they can meet the exact skill needs of employers.

A foundational problem that NCVET will encounter is how to deal with the 6,000 odd private VTPs incubated by NSDC, who only offer short-term courses, whose placement success rate has been consistently poor.

NCVET has its task cut out – to provide a strong oversight mechanism for outcomes of Skill India. Credit: msde.gov.in

One fundamental dichotomy

NCVT awards certificates to pass out candidates under different schemes of the DGT, mainly the ITIs. This assessment and certification role of NCVT has no direct overlap with NSDA as NSDA does not award any certifications. Over the years NCVT certification has gained brand value and hence must be further built on. In case, the identities of the two bodies are changed, it would be inappropriate for the new regulator (NCVET) to give certificates at ITIs but leave certifications for NSDC-supported courses to the 38+ Sector Skill Councils (SSCs) – which have a poor track record in credible certifications, as is evident from regular newspaper reports of bogus certifications.

Hence, an autonomous board “National Board for Skills Assessment and Certification (NBSAC)” (which had been proposed to be created two years ago by the Ministry of Skills Development, but till not been created), should be required to be attached to NCVET to perform the dedicated tasks of assessment and certification of skill training in the country.

The newly created NCVET should now issue NCVT certificates like National Trade Certificate (NTC), National Apprenticeship Certificate (NAC) and others due to their brand value, and ensure recognition of such certification in recruitment rules of various organisations.

Urgent priorities

The biggest failure of the National Skills Qualification Framework has been no real development of “Credit Framework” for multi-entry and multi-exit for students to provide horizontal and vertical mobility, which had been proposed in the 2011 design of the NSQF. A reality based credit framework needs to be developed by the new regulator on an urgent basis for all its skill courses to promote mobility between various courses.

The press release for NCVET mentions that “regulatory functions currently being carried out by the NSDC through the Sector Skill Councils will also be housed in the NCVET.”

It must be mentioned here that NSDC was never a regulatory body because it cannot be, by its very nature. NSDC is a public-private partnership and because 51% equity is that of the private sector, it is essentially a private sector body, therefore, not competent to undertake regulatory functions. In the UK, SSCs were licensed by a government body called Sector Skill Development Authority and subsequently this work was transferred to UK Commission on Employment and Skills (UKCES). The work of managing/setting up of SSCs is the regulators job and hence NCVET must take a lead role in it. India has too many sector skill councils and rationalising them as per the National Industry Classification as proposed by the Sharda Prasad Committee is a key area of work that needs immediate action.

Also Read: How to ‘Skill India’ When the Jobs are Bad

The creation of NCVET can ensure harmonisation and provide a major (though not sole) regulatory authority for skill development in the country (at least for ITIs and NSDC-funded VTPs). For school-level vocational education, the Ministry of Human Resource Development is the regulator; for the 16 Union ministries running training, each of those ministries is the regulator. And of course corporate companies which conduct VET have no regulator. So there is confusion enough already. The creation of NCVET at least some confusion.

However, it is not just institutions but the people who run these institutions that defines them. Hence the role of the leadership team in NCVET will be very important to achieve its objectives.

Santosh Mehrotra is professor, Centre for Labour, JNU, and a lead author of the NSQF. Ashutosh Pratap works for Skills and Jobs Policy. He is an MBA graduate from ISB Hyderabad.