Several private sector VET providers have sprung up across the country and are providing excellent vocational education and placing hitherto unemployable youth in well-paid jobs
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ONE OF THE MOST POSITIVE developments in Indian education during the new millennium, has been the establishment’s discovery of vocational education and training (VET). Although several educationists such as the Mumbai-based VET evangelist Krishan Khanna have been campaigning for decades against the neglect of vocational education, their warnings were ignored by the mandarins of the Union HRD ministry and ivory-tower academics for over half a century. Only in the new millennium after the national skills gap assumed alarming proportions and the Indian economy began manifesting the paradox of high industry vacancies, high youth including graduate unemployment and low industry and agriculture productivity (a phenomenon repeatedly documented by EducationWorld), did the establishment wake up.
In 2009, the Congress-led UPA-II government established a National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) — a public-private partnership enterprise — with a capital corpus of Rs.1,000 crore to build a sustainable ecosystem to promote skills development.
NSDC’s mandate is to provide long-term loans to private sector VET firms, set up sector skill councils with employer engagement to prescribe standards and benchmarks, accredit training institutions to certify trainees, and encourage industry to employ trained personnel. The corporation’s goal is to ensure private sector VET providers skill 150 million youth and workers by the year 2020.
Following the sudden and belated awakening of the Indian establishment and educationists to the vital importance of formally delivered VET — according to Khanna, currently 90 million youth are enrolled in 500,000 VET institutions across China, whereas the number of youth enrolled in India’s 11,800 VET institutions (including 5,114 Industrial Training Institutes run by the Union ministry of labour) is a mere 3.5 million — several private sector VET providers have sprung up across the country and are providing excellent vocational education and placing hitherto unemployable youth in well-paid jobs. Among them: Head Held High Services Pvt. Ltd, Bangalore; Centurion University, Odisha; Samarthanam, Bangalore, an NGO which provides VET to visually impaired youth; Intel-Udyogini School of Entrepreneurship, Jharkhand; and the Bangalore-based Movement for Alternative Youth Awareness (Maya), whose impactful VET initiatives were extensively detailed by this publication (EW April).
“By integrating India’s industrial economy with the country’s vast rural hinterland, four factor endowments of the subcontinent will be developed rapidly. These are: a massive pool of young labour, the inherent entrepreneurial spirit of the people, a high aspirations society and democratisation of technology. Skilling and training the huge labour pool of rural India will stimulate a productivity revolution in agriculture, industry and services sectors of the economy which will dramatically transform India into a surpluses producing, major exporter nation,” predicts Madan Padaki, promoter-chairman of Head Held High Services (estb. 2007) which has thus far established 15 training centres in Karnataka and one in neighbouring (former) Andhra Pradesh. Together, these centres have trained over 1,000 rural illiterates and school graduates under the company’s Rubanomics programme which trains rural youth for urban employment.