Views on Industry Based-Demand and Manpower Supply

Sharda Prasad
Director General,
Directorate General
Employment and Training,
Ministry of Labour and
Employment, Government of
India, New Delhi

The Directorate General of Employment & Training (DGE&T) in Ministry of Labour is the apex organisation for development and coordination at National level for programmes relating to Vocational Training.

In a brief conversation with digital Learning, Sharda Prasad expresses his high hopes on Industrial Training Institutes. 

According to a survey conducted by the Boston Consulting Group and the US Censor Bureau, there will be a deficit of trained manpower in the country by 2020 by 46 mn and in that situation India will have a surplus of trained population by 47 mn. Therefore, we are training people in such a way so that they make it possible to work even out side the country, globally.

What are the major challenges and opportunities in the process of training labourers and employing manpower in the informal sectors of economy.

After independence, one of the basic objectives of the government was to industrialise the country and therefore, formed Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956. To trace the feedback from the industry about their requirements in trained technical manpower the Compulsory Notification of Vacancies, Act 1959 was also framed which made it mandatory for the industry to provide information about their requirement of technically trained manpower  to the Employment Exchanges.

Besides, the entry at the moment of labour force in the market is around 12.8 million every year while our training capacity for the trained workforce is only about 3.1 million. Therefore, there is a huge gap of about 10 million per year. Therefore, the industry should come forward, feel free to participate and also sees a business opportunity in investing in the training process.

How has India adopted the concept of ITI, if at all?

In India the process was started by the government and the concept of ITI (Industrial Training Institute) was mooted along with the idea of employment exchange. Till 1968 there were about 850 ITIs and ITCs in the country. In the 2004 budget, the Finance Minister announced of upgrading of as many as 500 ITIs into the Centres of Excellence. And in that 100 will be upgraded from the domestic fund itself while the major 400 will have to have the world bank fund. The project was although launched in the year of 2004-05 but actually started taking a shape from 2005-06 initially with 100 ITIs.

Have all the proposed ITIs been converted into the centres of excellence?

Some parts of the plan is yet to be met in a year from now. It is a five years plan where the states also have to contribute at least 25 %. Around 22 new sectors were adopted in the new course that included hospitality, production, manufacturing, tourism, construction, leather technology, garments designing and textile manufacturing, etc. The training methodology was also modified to a two years course where the first year itself has six modules instead of one in the earlier to make the student a multi-skilled worker. In the second year during the first six months he gets a special training in one of those six modules he got inducted in the first year and in the next six months he gets a hardcore hands on industry training on that particular module he has been trained recently. After two years of the complete training he comes out as a multi-skilled worker ready to work as per the requirement of the industry. In the process, Industry Management Committee (IMC) was introduced which was headed by a member from the industry. IMC was made responsible to trace the requirement of the industry, getting involved in the training as well as the on-the-job training and apprenticeship of the student. There are 11 members in the committee where five are from the industry along with the Chairman, five from the state government and the Principal is the member secretary.

How the mission of National Skill Development Board has been taken forward to the rural population?

We are now in the process of setting up 1500 new ITIs and 50,000 Skill Development Centres through Private-Public-Partnership (PPP) process. These Skill Development Centres are actually the smaller versions of ITIs. Now these new 1500 ITIs will be at the un-serviced blocks at the rural areas, where a proper set up of education and training is not present adequately. The new 50,000 skill development centres will be distributed one in each of a cluster of 10 villages which will mainly train the local population that will help in the development of the local industry, market as well as the rural population of the country. The scheme is expected to launch by January 2010.

A large scale of the trained population goes out, what is your say on that?

Yes, a certain percentage goes out every year abroad. Till date as per record, around 6.5 lakh has already gone out. We also encourage people to take up jobs outside India. According to a survey conducted by the Boston Consulting Group and the US Censor Bureau, there will be a deficit of trained manpower in the country by 2020 by 46 mn and in that situation India will have a surplus of trained population by 47 mn. Therefore, we are training people in such a way so that they make it possible to work even out side the country, globally.

You have earlier talked about the formalisation and upgradation of the training centres towards more formal and organised sectors, could you please give us an idea of that.

We are in process to develop special councils for all the sectors headed by the industry experts of the relevant sector. National Skill Development Corporations have been given the responsibilities of setting up the sectoral expert councils with the help of the industry stalwarts. We also are planning to chalk out a guideline for strategic communication policies to publicise the excerpts of Government’s plans and performances in the sector.  In the process all the government ITIs will also be upgraded overtime while the new ITIs and skill development centres will come up eventually. 500 institutes have already been covered in the domestic and world bank funded schemes and the rest will be covered in the PPP scheme of 3,550 crores in five years of time. We have already released a 1500 crores and 750 crores awaits for this year and the rest will be released in the next three years. According to our Prime Minister’s instructions we have to train 500 mn people by 2022 for the industry. We have estimated it around 40 mn per annum. Besides, 969 employment exchange branches will be modernised at a cost of 12 crores. Through the centres’ websites we will be able to take into account the requirement of the industry.