The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has decided to fund the process of the control on modernization of Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs), as a result of the ongoing war between the private players. The union government will allocate adequate fund to modernize the 1,896 ITIs across the nation, which at present enrolls more than five lakh students.The government is planning to invest INR 5,291 crore to rejuvenate these institutes. This includes INR 1,581 crore from The World Bank and INR 3,550 to be hopefully raised through the Public Private Partnership (PPP) model. The institutes were able to spend merely 7.35pc of allocated funds since 2007, while the government received just INR 41.88 crore from the industry.
While reviving the National Skill Development Mission (NSDM), Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India declared in 2008 that the government is planning to adopt an industry-prescribed curriculum to make the pass-outs more employable. With merely 2pc of the workforce being skilled, the employability of young Indians would be limited to only menial jobs if the number of skilled workforce did not grow substantially. Its failure may raise alarm bells as the national workforce is likely to increase by 45 million over the Eleventh Plan Period (2007-2012) while the country needs to employ nearly 58 million people to meet public objectives.
