Belatedly there’s a flurry of activity within the councils of government, chambers of commerce and Indian academia about stimulating vocational education and training to infuse employ-ment oriented skill-sets into India’s gigantic 509 million strong labour force and 450 million children. Dilip Thakore reports
A confluence of factors — stubborn persistence of youth unemployment fuelling the rising incidence of Naxalite atrocities in India’s most socio-economically backward states, and belated awareness in the boardrooms of Indian industry about the country’s accentuating shortage of skilled employees — has vaulted vocational and skills education to the top of the nation’s education agenda. Suddenly there is growing concern and a flurry of activity within the councils of government, chambers of commerce and Indian academia about stimulating vocational education and training to infuse employment-oriented skill-sets into India’s gigantic 509 million strong labour force, and the 100 million children and youth enroled in schools and colleges countrywide. Sixty years after independent India adopted the centrally planned model of economic develop-ment, the productivity of Indian indus-try and the labour force in particular, is abysmally low, the inevitable outcome of continuous neglect of vocational education and training.
Consequently despite hosting the world’s largest working age population and labour force, the Indian economy which for the past decade has been averaging unprecedented annual GDP (gross domestic product) growth rates of 8-9 percent, is experiencing the paradox of a massive — and growing — shortage of skilled and sufficiently trained personnel in agriculture, manufacturing and service industries. Confronted with the highest in-service employee training costs worldwide, intensifying shortage of skilled workers and rising wages which are jeopardising India Inc’s cost-competitiveness in world markets, alarm bells have begun to ring in somnolent government offices and the councils of Indian industry.
Therefore three years ago in his Independence Day speech delivered from the ramparts of the Red Fort, Delhi, on August 15, 2006, prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh announced a major national drive to disseminate and upgrade vocational education and training (VET) in India. Shortly thereafter in November, he set up a task force to draw up a timetable for establishing a nationwide VET infrastructure. Since then the Union budget has consistently made provision for VET through expan-sion and upgradation of the country’s 1,896 government-run Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and 3,218 private sector Industrial Training Centres (ITCs). An additional 1,500 ITIs/ITCs are budgeted to be established by the end of the current Eleventh Plan period in 2012, in addition to 50,000 skills development centres to be promoted in the PPP (public-private partnership) mode. In the Union budget 2009-10 an additional outlay of Rs.495 crore has been made for the expansion of the country’s VET network.
Likewise in anticipation of rising demand for VET from industry and the public, several private education heavyweight companies such as the Delhi-based Educomp Solutions Ltd (ESL; revenue: Rs.507.09 crore in fiscal 2008-09) and the Bangalore/Manipal-based Manipal Education Group (MEG; estimated annual revenue: Rs.814 crore) have diversified into VET in collabor-ation with two UK-based education conglomerates. ESL has tied up with the Pearson Group (the world’s largest producer of school textbooks and owner of the Financial Times and Penguin Books) to promote IndiaCan Education Pvt. Ltd. Almost simultaneously MEG has initiated a joint venture with the London-based City & Guilds which bills itself as the world’s largest VET provider offering 500 courses and programmes. Within the next few years these two ambitious alliances are expected to establish expansive networks of VET centres across the country, offering high-quality vocational education to millions of Indian youth.
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“Vocational education has been the blindspot of the Central and state governments as well as of Indian industry for the past six decades. All over the developed world and in China as well, representative organis-ations of industry, business, MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises) and local chambers of commerce have been the driving force behind the establishment and multiplication of VET institutions in their countries, serving as bridges between government and academia. The largest of India’s chambers of commerce — the Confe-deration of Indian Industry — has only 7,000 members, and that too mostly from the organised sector of industry. However 94 percent of the country’s industrial labour force is employed in 100 million MSMEs represented by inactive local chambers of commerce which are ignorant about the vital importance of VET for their own prosperity and competivity in the emerging globalised marketplace.
“For instance, against India’s blank score-card, rural China boasts 350,000 VET centres which train over 50 million farmers annually in agriculture, animal husbandry, horticulture, floriculture, farm equipment repair and maintenance, and better agriculture practices. This has enabled China, with less arable land than India, to better India’s foodgrains and agriculture production by a factor of three per hectare of area sown. We need to immediately promote 250,000 VET centres — one in every panchayat jurisdiction in rural India,” says Krishan Khanna, an alumnus of IIT-Kharagpur and former director of several blue-chip companies including Hoganas India Ltd and DeNora India Ltd who forsook a promising career in Indian industry to promote the i Watch Foundation in 1993, which has since emerged as the most prominent proponent of VET in India.
Unfortunately, Khanna has been a voice in the wilderness. And the Indian economy has paid a heavy price for neglecting vocational education and training. Currently there are 41 million youth registered with the employment bureaus of the country’s 28 state government and seven Union territories, and according to i Watch data another 260 million are either in disguised unemployment or under-employed.
The phenomenon of educated unemployed in a fast-track economy is peculiar to India. According to a 2005 NASSCOM-McKinsey World Institute study, over 75 percent of engineering and 85 percent of arts, science and commerce graduates in India are unemployable. Neither is the education they are prescribed up-to-date, nor are they taught marketable skills during their three-four years in college. “If despite this abysmal education system, the Indian economy is averaging 8-9 percent GDP growth annually, it is within the realm of possibility to double it, given education reform and universal VET,” says Khanna who urges government, industry and voluntary civil society organisations to urgently agree to introduce VET options in school curriculums from class VIII onwards.
Fortunately Khanna’s sustained advocacy of VET has finally struck a responsive chord within the Union government and India Inc. Together they have begun to seriously plan to make good the neglect of the past 60 years and disseminate VET on a mass scale. In October last year, the Union government and several representative associations of industry including CII, FICCI and Assocham promoted the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC), a first-of-its-type PPP (public private partnership) not-for-profit organisation to facilitate skills development education countrywide. Established with a corpus of Rs.1,000 crore, of which 51 percent is contributed by the private sector, NSDC will fund competent education entrepreneurs and NGOs to promote vocational education and training centres across India.
“NSDC’s goal is to contribute significantly — at least 30 percent — to the overall skilling and upskilling target of 500 million citizens by the year 2022 set by prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, by fostering private sector initiatives in skills development. To this end the corporation has initiated a process to invite proposals, and proposal submission templates, guides and funding guidelines are already available on the NSDC website (www.nsdcindia.org). We are in a hurry to activate NSDC and a study to identify skills gaps in 20 high-growth sectors has been completed. Moreover NSDC is in the process of establishing a pilot Sector Skills Council to draw up accreditation standards and curricula which will pave the way for promoting more such councils in the future, and a large number of captains of industry have agreed to share their expertise, infrastructure and domain knowledge in their areas of skills development to contribute to NSDC’s overall mandate. India’s skills gap is huge and scalable business models are urgently required to bridge the gap,” says M.V. Subbiah, chairman of the Chennai-based Murugappa Group of companies (estimated annual revenue: Rs.14,000 crore) who has been appointed the first chairman of NSDC.
The novelty of nsdc which inspires hope that ambitious outlays and rhetoric will actually translate into privately promoted VET and skills development centres, is that the corporation is managed by India Inc rather than a Union government ministry. Moreover it is a measure of the seriousness of intent of its promoters — the Union government and Indian industry — that it is being led by Subbiah who has a good track record of having steadily expanded and diversified the operations of the Murugappa Group (which includes EID Parry, Coromandel Fertiliser and Cholamandalam Finance) during the past two decades. It is also significant that NSDC is being led by a chairman based in Chennai which has perhaps the best engineering colleges and VET institutes countrywide, with its automotive components industry in particular having established a globally respected reputation.
Refreshing as well is the deep involvement of the Delhi-based Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the country’s largest and most active industry representative organisation, with the country’s rolling VET bandwagon. “In India very few young persons enter the world of work with any type of formal or informal vocational training. Indeed the proportion of formally trained youth in our labour force is among the lowest in the world. Currently the VET system has the capacity to train only 3 million youth against industry’s requirement of 13 million annually. Therefore attainment of the target set by the prime minister of skilling 500 million youth by 2022 necessitates large-scale skills develop-ment initiatives for which government-industry collaboration is necessary. Consequently CII has already taken the initiative to adopt 240 ITIs countrywide under the government’s public-private partnership progamme. Moreover we have been proactive in the areas of assessing skilled youth from government ITIs under the modular employable skills (MES) programme and providing the institutes industry linkages, revenue stream solutions and admin and management advice. Thus far CII has assessed more than 75,000 skilled youth across the country under the MES programme. CII is wholly committed to the national skills development initiative which requires serious collaboration and convergence between all stakeholders in the national development effort,” says B. Santhanam, the Chennai-based managing director of St. Gobain Glass India, a subsidiary of St. Gobain Group, France (annual revenue: Euros 40 billion or Rs. 256,000 crore). An alumnus of IIT-Madras and IIM-Ahmedabad, Santh-anam is also chairman of CII’s National Committee on Skills and Resources.
With government in New Delhi shedding its ideological baggage and prejudices and inviting private sector involvement, indeed takeover, of the national skills development mission, VET is all set to take off in a big way within the moribund government dominated education sector. With a large and growing number of private ICT (information communication techno-logy) companies such as Everonn Education, Educomp Solutions, NIIT and Helix Technologies among others, having already entered India’s vast and high-potential education space with innovative products and service delivery models, a new genre of edupreneurs ready, willing and equipped to enter the VET sector to train the country’s massive 509 million labour force and its 100 million school children, has appeared on the education scene.
An alum of DMET, Mumbai and IMT, Ghaziabad, Delhi-based Navin Bhatia is the founder-chief executive of three pan-India VET companies — NIS Sparta (1993-2003), Reliance Academy (2004-06) and Bharti Learning Systems Ltd which he describes as “amongst the 15 largest training companies worldwide with 600 full-time trainers and (annual) sales turnover exceeding Rs.100 crore”. Deeply involved with CII’s national human resource and skills development initiatives, and currently engaged in building a sectoral skills council model for state governments, Bhatia believes that if the Union government’s DGET (director general of education and training), CII and Indian industry work assiduously together, it is possible to transform India into the world’s largest pool of trained and skilled labour by the year 2022.
Arguing that post-independence India has adopted a “unique growth trajectory” in that it is the world’s only large economy which has transformed from an agricultural society into a services dominated economy leapfrogging the manufacturing phase, Bhatia states that this makes “large scale skills development an imminent national imperative”. “History is lived forward, but written backwards. In the next decade India will write a new history by transforming into the skills development epicentre of the world. In the year 2022, its 75th year of independence, India will host a population of 200 million university graduates and 500 million skilled professionals, and will export 50-55 million skilled professionals to the rest of the world,” he predicts, suggesting an eight-point plan to attain this desideratum.
Another promising private sector initiative which has entered the VET sector is IndiaCan Education Pvt. Ltd — a joint venture between India’s ICT-in-education heavyweight Educomp Solutions Ltd and the UK-based Pearson Group, one of the world’s largest school textbooks publishing majors which also owns the Financial Times and Penguin Books. According to Anjan Dutta, senior president of IndiaCan Education, the joint venture promoted in 2008, which provides “bridge education programmes linked to industry demand” of four weeks to six months duration in entry-level spoken English, retail, insurance, banking etc to youth in the age group 18-26, has already established 40 VET centres with an enrolment of over 4,000 students. “Within the next few years we intend to promote 500 centres with sophisticated equipment and shopfloor environments across the country with a targeted enrolment of 500,000 VET students,” says Dutta.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s painfully clear that the failure of post-independence India’s education and central planners to include vocational and skills education into school and college curriculums was a grave error. The consequence of this act of omission is a severely handicapped population heavily dependent upon a largely untrained learning-by-doing labour force for simple tasks such as mending an electrical fuse, connecting a car battery or changing a flat tyre. The wider social outcome is an economy characterised by abysmally low farm, manufacturing and service sector productivity which has transformed post-independence India into a society of perennial shortages and high prices. Little wonder that despite being abundantly endowed with factors of production — land, labour, capital and native spirit of enterprise — 21st century India is among the world’s most laggard nations widely pitied for its illiteracy, high child mortality, child malnutrition and labour, social inequality and pervasive corruption.
However following the belated liberalisation of the Indian economy and loosening of the infamous licence-permit-quota regime — which sent-enced the population to the 3 percent per year “Hindu rate” of GDP growth for almost four decades — since the historic Union budget of July 1991, the annual rate of GDP growth has more than tripled. Consequently for the first time in recent history the Indian economy has begun to experience shortages of skilled professionals and labour, a pheno-menon which is sharply driving up wages and salaries and hurting India’s price competitiveness in the emerging global market.
Yet given the pathetic record of the government-dominated education system to implement the simplest policies for the benefit of the nation’s children and youth, there is considerable skepticism whether the sudden re-discovery of the value and importance of VET will translate into institutions delivering accessible, short-term, hands-on education and training programmes to the country’s millions of under-employed, low-productivity youth. In this context it’s pertinent to note that VET is hardly a new idea. Way back in the 1950s, the first Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) were promoted by state governments countrywide and their number has multiplied to 5,700 currently. Yet encumbered with under-investment in infrastructure and equipment, outdated curriculums and poor quality teachers, they have failed to enthuse Indian industry, with most of their graduates wending their way into low-performance public sector enterprises and state government departments such as PWD, state electricity boards and civic government.
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But this time round the active involvement of private sector organisations such as CII and FICCI, which are working closely with the Central government and the PMO (prime minister’s office), has roused hope that even if belatedly, the government-industry VET initiative will take off and take wing. “Although this time both government and industry are very serious about building a nationwide infrastructure as evidenced by the establishment of the Prime Minister’s Skills Council in 2008 with the six private sector industry representatives and the nodal ministries of HRD, finance and labour as partners, and the promotion of the National Skills Development Corporation with a corpus of Rs.1,000 crore to promote VET institutions in the PPP (public-private partnership) model, it is important to bear in mind that vocational education and training institutes will need to be established with the support of state governments. The challenge is to set up state level Skills Missions which will encourage the promotion of VET institutions in the PPP mode. In the Eleventh Plan a generous outlay of Rs.28,000 crore has been made for VET. But this money will be spent by the HRD, labour and 19 other ministries and there’s the omnipresent danger of outlays not being commensurate with outcomes. However in several states — notably Rajasthan, Karnataka and Gujarat — Skills Missions have been established and I am optimistic that the new government-industry partnership for VET will move into execution,” says Manish Sabharwal, the Bangalore-based chief executive of TeamLease Services Pvt. Ltd, India’s largest skilled personnel placement company, and a member of the PM’s Skills Council.
Even within the Union HRD ministry in Delhi there is evidence of unprecedented seriousness of intent about infusing VET into school syllabuses and systems. According to Subhash Khuntia, joint secretary in the HRD ministry, the options of vocational stream education as well as stand-alone vocational subjects which can be taken as electives at the higher secondary stage are already available to students of the country’s 12,000 schools affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) which is directly supervised by the ministry.
“CBSE has introduced a new course on financial market management at the Plus Two level in collaboration with the National Stock Exchange. It proposes to introduce similar courses in hospitality management in collaboration with the National Council of Catering Manage-ment and also in fashion technology and garment manufacture, film making techniques, healthcare, design and innovation. The HRD ministry is in the process of revamping the vocational education scheme to make it more demanding and needs-based in strong collaboration with industry,” says Khuntia.
Certainly the auguries are good that this time round the carefully crafted government-industry initiative to establish a national VET infrastructure which will provide upskilling opportunities to India’s huge 509 million low-productivity labour force, will bear fruit. But this government-industry effort also needs to be supplemented by India’s educators’ community and academia. Vocational skills training needs to be integrated into school and college curriculums, and the national mindset which segregates academic education from hands-on skills requires a sea-change. That’s the bigger challenge confronting teachers and academics engaged in the task of educating and preparing the world’s largest child population for the 21st century.
With Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)