The much touted demographic transition in the Indian population has much to offer in terms of economic and social returns.
But India’s vocational education landscape needs to be devised to be able to support mass skilling in order to capitalise on this “demographic divided”.
What are the governmental actions in this domain?
Capitalising the demographic dividend is key to India’s growth and skilling is mandatory to channelize the youthful workforce to enhance productivity.
To further this, in 2016, the government appointed “Sharada Prasad Committee” to rationalise the Sector Skill Councils (SSCs) had gave its report.
SSCs are promoted by employer bodies like Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), to better skill the work force.
It is now prudent to look at the reforms that Sharada Prasad committee had suggested and the action taken for vocational education/training (VET).
What are the Sharada Prasad Committee recommendations?
The two goals in ‘Skill India’ are - to meet employers’ needs of skills and, to prepare workers (young and old) for a decent livelihood.
Mindset - The report has prominently focused on youth, and has underlined that the vocational education is not just for underprivileged communities.
Further, it has stressed that it is not a stopgap arrangement for those who cannot make it through formal education but for all.
School reforms - Concrete steps have been suggested to have a separate stream for vocational education within the secondary education setup.
Creating vocational schools and colleges for upward mobility, and having a Central university to award degrees and diplomas has also been proposed.
Notably, in China, a separate stream for vocational education is offered after “class 9”, and almost half the students choose this vocational stream.
Challenges - The need for stemming the problem of the rising numbers of unemployed degree holders due to mushrooming of poor quality tertiary educational institutions has been recommended.
While employer engagement is needed, currently, private vocational training providers (VTPs) haven’t been producing the desired output.
Also, National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) - that provides short-term training can’t be a substitute for the scale and quality of skilling required.
What needs to be done to better the quality of training programs?
Our human potential needs to be harnessed by designing our courses as platform for life-long learning and in accordance with international standards.
Strengthening reading, writing and arithmetic skills is important for any skilling program as it is key to enable faster grasping.
Courses - This will help in equipping people with a skillset that is in demand, along with considerable national/global mobility across jobs as per the need.
This means that we should have no more that 450 courses that are to be broad enough in scope to facilitate job mobility – (as recommended by International Standard Classificaton of Occupations)
But we currently have nearly 10,000 standards for courses, which is also against the “National Skills Qualification Framework” recommendation.
Durations - Vocational training must by definition be for a minimum of a year, which includes internship (without which certification is not possible).
Short-term training should be confined to recognising prior learning of trained workers who are already working and not a standalone certification program.
Accountability - Cases of a conflict of interests, rigged assessments and training happening only on paper have been cropping up for long.
A parliamentary report has also pointed to regulatory failures in the approvals granted by the Quality Council of India for thousands of ITIs.
This has lead to the proliferation of poor quality private ITIs, which significabtly went from 2,000 to 11,00o in just five years.
Skilling institutions are fleecing trainees and there seems to be a huge ethics and accountability deficit which needs to be rectified by better regulations.
What are the structural reforms needed?
NSDC issue - An NSDC-centric focus (where industries are roped in for short term training) has negated established structured mandates of skilling.
Also, it has been noted that NSDC programs are providing merely 12% employments for those who’ve completed its short-term courses.
This is because the training period is too short and there is a regulatory deficit, both of which mandate that better engaging the private sector is needed.
Industry Lead - Corporate sector pins the blame on the government when it laments about “unemployable youth”, but rather it needs to take the lead.
While corporate are the key benefactors of a skilled labour force, only 36% of India’s organised sector firms conduct in-firm training (mostly large ones).
A government piloted skilling program would inherently be a supply driven one, but it is desirable to constitute a demand oriented skilling push.
Hence, it needs to be recognized that a publicly funded but industry drive model works best as the companies realise demands better than governments.
The government needs to actively take up the role of actively supporting these efforts through proper regulations and crucial employment indicator data.
