The National Skill Development Council

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has written to all chief ministers, asking them to join in, doing two things. One, make available the buildings of higher educational institutions of the state for skill development programmes after regular class hours; two, form state level missions headed by the chief ministers themselves to co-ordinate the efforts of different government departments and agencies as well as involve local experts and representatives of different skill sectors. The letter went last Saturday. High-minded exhortation goes only so far. The Centre knows this. So, out of the Rs 275,000-crore allocation for education in the Eleventh Plan (five times as much as in the Tenth Plan), Rs 31,000 crore has been allocated to skill development. States can hope to tap into these funds, to convert unemployable youth into productive workers. This is not all. The finance ministry has promoted a National Skill Development Corporation as a not-for-profit company. This, too, will channel funds to assorted skill development activities across the country.But skill development is not a homogeneous activity. The shortage of a million nurses cannot be met by the efforts of those whose job is to train lathe operators or by computer-animators. Different sectors, different ministries, different companies and voluntary agencies must get involved, pool resources, dovetail activities into a shared operating infrastructure. Hence, the importance of the third skills body set up by the Centre, in addition to the PM’s council and the corporation: the National Skill Development Co-ordination Board, to be co-ordinated by the Planning Commission, and the proposed missions at the state level. Myriad ways of promoting skills have to be innovated, to meet the requirements of each sector, each state, each region’s degree of development. These cannot be laid down in any central blueprint. But the commitment of the political class, when combined with private initiative and administrative skills of the bureaucracy, can make skill development actually happen on the scale envisaged.The skills development council has proposed two key principles that would ensure that the skills training undertaken would, indeed, be effective. One is to funnel the funding to the trainee, rather than to the training institution. Training institutions would have to compete to attract would-be trainees endowed with scholarships/loans/vouchers/company sponsorships. Such competition would ensure the quality of delivery. The other idea is bankability of the training.Various other ideas yet to be crystallised into policy include giving tax breaks for sponsoring skillstraining — much like those available now for one’s own children’s education.The scheme is getting launched at the fag end of the present government’s term. It can succeed only if the political class understands the urgent imperative of upgrading skills of India’s large and growing young population, the largest for any country in the world. If they are empowered with knowledge and skills, they will power not just the Indian economy but the entire world. If they remain unschooled and unskilled, social violence and morbidity would choke off the potential of even the minority that does manage to get a decent education.