Mangaluru: The whole country is facing shortage of skilled workers and the biggest challenge that the country is facing is how to create skilled workforce. Since independence our country was ruled by educated, but they were not skilled, said Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Union Minister of State Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, during an interaction meeting organized by Kanara Small Industries, Assocation Baikampady.
He said that if one looks at countries like Japan, Korea, UK, Germany and the USA their workforce is skilled upto 96 per cent, but here in India it stands as a meagre 4 per cent.
The situation has cropped up due to our pre-independence background, he said adding that when the British ruled India, the first skill they taught was English. They had a purpose behind it- to use the English-learned Indians in the administration machinery.
The pre-historic remnants do hint that skill existed then, but post-independence era brought in a trend of people without skill ruling the country.
“Initially the department that dealt with education was known as ministry of education and it was observed, that, it just provided education alone, but failed to develop skills. Ministry of Human Resources Development was evolved with the idea of developing skills. This is going on for last 40years. But unfortunately all those people who dealt with education, were distinctly biased towards skills, because of which we lost track of skills,” said the Minister adding that even to this day ‘skill’ has remained to be a big challenge for India.
Rudy said that in a country like India where there are 18 lac engineering seats, over nine lakh seats are not taken. This shows that professional course of degree has lost its significance.
The formal technical education that was taking place in this country, was through ITI. There are 13000 ITIs in the country and around 2000 are in the government sector, and around 1000 are very good. Other 10,000 have failed to give potential work force what is required. Across the country the industries need trained manpower, he opined.
Speaking about various steps taken by the government, he said that industries in the country can tie up with National Skills Development Corporation and become training partners. Incentive like annual stipend of Rs. 18000/- annually is paid during the training period each person undergoing training, the minister for Skills training. Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) is the flagship scheme of the Ministry of Skill Development and Enterprenuership (MSDE). The objective of this skill certification scheme is to enable a large number of Indian youth to take up industry-relevant skill training that will help them in securing a better livelihood. Individuals with prior learning experience or skills will also be assessed and certified under Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL). This is approved for another four years (2016-20) to benefit 10 million youths and the allocated budget is Rs.12,000 Crores.
