The CEO of National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), Manish Kumar, said that they skill about 5 lakh students every year from class 9th to 12th standard and around 86 per cent of them get jobs compared to the PMKVY model, in which only 35 per cent students succeed to get jobs, in an event of BW Education-Top Education Brands of India 2017-on Friday in Le Meridien, New Delhi.
Adding to it he said, “They are trained in 16 different skills, based on their choice of what they want to be trained on. This shows that when we do skilling in schools, the outcome is far superior.” Skilling should start at school-level as both skills and academics co-exist and when people move from academics to a skill-based environment, there remains no bar between a skilled person and an academician as it was the case earlier, Kumar said.
Elaborating he said that times have changed and the new generation thinks very differently about jobs, thus even we should strive to make a difference in a way people think.
Why is skill critical for India?
For India to reach its pinnacle of economic growth, it is very crucial to introduce skilled labour-force in the country. Our financial journey which commenced in 2005 and which might go up to 2045, requires skilled generation which would enable India to outshine economically.
“From the economic perspective, three things that we need to work on are labor, capital and technology. Human capital or labor is the most essential, where the role of skill comes into play,” said Kumar. Thus today, getting skills right is very critical for India, according to NSDC.
Challenges
Explaining on what NSDC does and the challenges that they are facing, Kumar said that they work in 40 different sectors of the economy using about 12 thousand trainee partners in a public-private partnership mode (profit and non-profit both). They ensure that about 4 million people are skilled every year. However, around 1 million people come into the workforce every month, thus indicating an enormous improvement still to be made.
An additional challenge is that nearly 70 per cent of women in India are not in labor-force, which is not a good sign for any country that wants to grow economically.