Sikkim is the first fully organic state of India and wants to utilise this USP to its advantage, using the ‘organic state’ tag for its skill mission, says Mrinalini Srivastava, Additional Secretary, Skills cum Chief Administrator, State Institute of Capacity Building, in a candid conversation with Gautam Debroy of Elets News Network (ENN)

What initiatives have you taken for the development of Sikkim’s skill sector?
The Hon’ble Chief Minister of Sikkim has started Skill Vision in 2003 and that’s when the idea of State Institute of capacity building came into being. But given the geographical and topographical location of Sikkim, it took some time to develop the infrastructure.
In 2008- 2009, the infrastructure got ready. And State Institute of Capacity Building, following a cabinet nod, started in 2009. Till date, we have trained over 11,000 students in our state. We have also received good response in traditional sector like agriculture.

What are your key focus areas?
Largely our focus areas are agriculture and traditional arts. When the Government of India launched Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Yojana scheme, the State was also looking at the placement opportunities. In August 2015, we started a combination strategy taking both placement linked initiatives and self employment linked initiatives.
We also started job fairs. First such job mela was held in November 2015. We also started doing aspirations study, which was supported by North Eastern Development Finance Institution (NEDFI). At the same time, National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) has also been doing an aspirations study. As a result, we got a big data of youth workforce population (around 1 lakh) projected until 2022.
Subsequently, we approached Ministry Of Development Of North Eastern Region (DoNER), Ministry of Skill and NEC besides opening corporate social responsibility funding .
In December 2015, under the mandatory skill mission, we had started the skill department. We are fairly new in terms of skill department, but we have a significant experience in terms of skilling. In the last one year, we had trained 3,900 people and placed 3,500 youths in different organisations.

Tell us about hospitality and tourism sector?
Hospitality and Tourism are the key aspirations of our youths.
After we were declared as an organic state this year, we started focusing on revamping our entire outlook on farming. Earlier, it was just training on agriculture, but now it is end to end linkage (from procurement to selling and branding of the product) on farming. We have created certain clusters, and we have taken the key crops by focusing on spices, keeping all the four districts of the state in loop.

Tell us about regional resource centre?
The regional resource centre concept has also worked very well. We have already worked with several skill societies including Nagaland skill initiative society, Manipur and Mizoram skill initiative society. The responses have been encouraging and we hope to mobilize the other adjoining states as well. We have a special web portal for the promotion of skill. It’s www.skillyoungindia.com and under this portal we have tied up with the NSDC. We are also coming with enewsletter called ‘enabled’, which literally helped our mission. Skill Young India provide base for trainees looking for opportunities and industry looking for skilled labour.

How do you find skill resources in Sikkim and other north eastern states in comparison to the rest of country?
For that I would like to give credit to the leadership of our Chief Minister. We are reaping the benefits from the projects we had started a decade back. He initiated the projects of ‘livelihood schools’ which was essentially focused on local resources and local requirements. And now with the skill India mission and skilled linked jobs coming up, the game has become bigger.
In that way, the concept of livelihood school has helped us a lot. It also helped our partners with the ready to use infrastructure.

What about the logistics for skill mission?
If you look at the logistical part, which are required for mobilisation, I think the entire northeast is suffering from lack of funds. I would strongly recommend that the Government of India must pool funds for the mobilisation to enter in some of the remote areas of the region.
Certain strategy which worked in rest of the country for example media, it may not work in a state like Arunachal Pradesh. So, there should be sufficient funds for the on ground mobilisation through local self governance.

We are doing this by building an end-to-end curriculum of educational games, which offer a deep gaming plus educational experience.

Sikkim has been announced as the organic state of India. What is its relation with the Skill Sector?
When we talk of skilling, it should be for employability. With skill initiatives, everybody should be able to earn their livelihood. Announcement of Sikkim as the organic state is our USP. And we want to use that unique selling proposition for our advantage. Organic as such is a technical phenomena, and under that we should be able to get better advantage of our skill mission. n

We are working towards the establishment of one Model Skill Center in each district of the country, which would be operational in over 500 districts by March 2017. These will be high-quality centers which will help make skill development aspirational and accessible, says Jaikant Singh, Head, Partnership and State Alliance, National Skill Development Corporation, in an exclusive interview with Gautam Debroy of Elets News Network (ENN)

Tell us about your initiatives to develop skill sector in India.
Sector Skill Councils (SSCs) have been set up as an autonomous industry-led bodies for steering skill development and training. They are responsible for certification, training the trainers and accreditation.

They create National Occupation Standards for their respective sectors to standardise trades and courses. The SSCs also forecast any changes in the labour market and enable standardisation of affiliation and accreditation processes.

Some SSCs are also working on promoting academies of excellence and helping in executing train-the-trainer programmes.

Till date, the NSDC Board has approved 40 SSC which cater to the requirements of high growth sectors ranging across agriculture, construction, healthcare, BFSI, IT/ITeS and retail. Several SSCs are working closely with organisations such as the European Union, International Labour Organization, the UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI) among others, with the objective of introducing international best practices in India.

The SSCs are also responsible for engaging with the Central and State-level implementing agencies in developing the curriculum package, engagement and capacity building of vocational teachers and assessment and certification of the skills imparted.

Do you have any time-frame in sight to turn the country into skilled India?
The launch of the Skill India Campaign is an important milestone towards achieving the objective of skilling with Speed, Scale and Standards across the country. By 2022 we aim to train over 40 crore (400 million) people and National Skill Development Corporation’s (NSDC) target is to achieve skilling of 15 crore (150 million) by fostering private sector initiatives in the skill development space. For the financial year 2015-16 more than 1.04 Crore youth have been trained under the Skill India Mission. Pradhan Mantri Kaushal VikasYojana (PMKVY), also witnessed around 20 lakh enrolment of which 19, 73,813 candidates are being trained in their choice of skills. We are also working towards the establishment of one Model Skill Center in each district of the country, which would be operational in more than 500 districts by March 2017. These will be high-quality centers which will help make skill development aspirational and accessible.

Do you have any state specific strategy?
Most State Governments have set up State Skill Development Missions (SSDM) as nodal bodies to anchor the skill development agenda in the State. To support their various initiatives, NSDC has partnered with different state governments and signed MoUs to improve Employability Skills of the youth. We are working in conjunction with the state government to expand the reach of government flagship scheme – Pradhan Mantri Kaushal VikasYojana (PMKVY) to regions where there has been a lesser focus on skill development till now. We will also be working closely with the ITIs network in the country to ensure short term skill courses are being introduced and run across engineering colleges and polytechnics that are in distress currently and will add to capacity building for skill development for the youth in India. Also to accelerate the pace of skill development we have special state specific skill development program for J&K and Northeast states.

What response are you getting from states? Which states are doing well in skill sector?
NSDC operates through partnerships with multiple stakeholders including State Governments and we are getting favorable responses from them. As stated above we have partnership with different state governments for skill mission to improve Employability Skills of the youth.

What challenges you are facing while implementing your projects?
India is one of the youngest nations and we have the potential to create skilled human resources who can be employed, based on industry standards, to not only companies in India but also overseas.

By 2022, India will have the maximum number of working age population in the world. The FICCI-KPMG Global Skills Report has noted that if properly skilled, they can contribute to economic growth. In India alone we have 109 million incremental human resources requirement across 24 key sectors by 2022. However, only 4.69 percent of the Indian population has undergone formal skills training as compared to 68 percent in UK, 75 percent in Germany, 52 percent in USA, 80 percent in Japan and 96 percent in South Korea. This presents a huge challenge to growth. Another challenge is vocational education and implementation of national skill qualification framework in collaboration with school education and higher education.

Are you looking for foreign investment in skill sector?
We already have been funding from World Bank of Rs 480 crore and is expected to provide skill training to over 50 lakh (5 million) people. Ministry of skill development is engaged actively with several countries for skill training, training of the trainers and setting up of model centers of excellence and creation of international mobility through mapping job roles and development of transnational standards. Several SSCs are working closely with organisations such as the European Union, International Labour Organization, the UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI) etc with the objective of introducing international best practices in India. We have a larger mission and welcome support from bilateral and multilateral agencies.

How do you find Northeast as far as skill development is concerned?
Skill India initiative has a special focus to develop infrastructure in the North- Eastern states. In the union budget northeast has got prime focus in the overall development plan for the country. There has been a special allocation of 150 crores for North east states for skill development under MSDE’s flagship scheme of Pradhan Mantri Kaushal VikasYojana (PMKVY), which is a monetary reward scheme to encourage the youth to opt for skill development. Also, Ministry of Skill Development has planned to set up skill development centres in all blocks of Assam and the other north-eastern states to increase employability of the younger generation. Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi Ji had announced for the setting up of a Centre of Excellence in the region for the skill training to facilitate overseas employment.

By 2022 we aim to train over 40 crore (400 million) people and National Skill Development Corporation’s (NSDC) target is to achieve skilling of 15 crore (150 million) by fostering private sector initiatives in the skill development space. For the financial year 2015-16 more than 1.04 crore youth have been trained under the Skill India Mission.

Also, government of these states have started their respective skill development missions to meet the aspirations of skilling the youth and employability. We have identified several training partners, signed MoU with private companies and are further exploring the public private partnership (PPP) route for establishing ITIs and skill centers in the region. NSDC also conducted several Kaushal Mela to mobilise youth in north eastern state.

Jharkhand government is progressively working on skill development sector and targeting to hone skills of 20 lakh people in fi ve years. Efforts are on to tackle all problems coming in the way of mission, says Ravi Ranjan, Mission Director, Jharkhand Skill Development Mission, in an exclusive tete-a-tete with Gopi Krishna Arora of Elets News Network (ENN).

What is your mandate as a mission director for students’ skill development in Jharkhand?
To skill as many people as possible, the target is to sharpen the skills of 20 lakh youth in next fi ve years. We are doing it in two ways. One is the target assigned to the mission itself and secondly, there are different departments having their own training programmes. The mission will act as a guiding center for other departments and other departments can get details and latest guidelines from it. We also are empaneling training providers so that the other departments need not to provide the training for same skill. So, once we empanelled all the training providers, they can use the services of those trainers.

Skill India is the buzzword of today. What is the roadmap for Jharkhand?
Skill is not aspirational. Since the evolution of mankind, in case of India, skills are associated with the lower castes like barber, carpenter, blacksmith etc. Nobody wants to touch this area. But slowly the education is improving and the people are getting exposure of happenings in other countries and other places. So the people are slowly taking interests in these things. Our idea is to make it aspirational. And we are involving the schools in designing the curriculum in such a manner that skills can be enhanced from the school itself, then in degree colleges, in polytechnics and engineering colleges. So, we are going to involve all institutions in our skilling programme. Every domain requires a separate kind of skill set and due to lack of these skills, even after completing the courses, people are not getting jobs. So our curriculum will be designed in keeping the above things in mind.

What initiatives have been undertaken in this pilot phase by the government under Jharkhand Skill Development Mission?
We are targeting various initiatives such as partnering with corporate houses, selecting training partners for centres in blocks, opening mega skill development centres at district headquarters, starting training components and bridge courses in schools, ITIs, polytechnics and engineering colleges and ensuring placements to achieve the aforementioned target.

What sectors are you focussing on for skill development?
We are trying to cover as many sectors for skilling the youth of Jharkhand. To name a few, the focus is on the sectors like IT/ITES, Agriculture, mining, construction, banking, financial services, logistics, food processing, tourism and hospitality, manufacturing, retail, beauty, and wellness and healthcare.

Jharkhand Government has signed MoUs with many corporate. Tell us about the MoUs with Cisco and other companies.
The MoU signed between state government and Cisco is for e-learning software and to enhance the information technology skills of youth through the Cisco Networking Academy Programme. Tie-ups with corporates like Siemens, Oracle, PTC and Tech Mahindra are also on the anvil.

How much target has been achieved so far under the mission?
Under Saksham Jharkhand Kaushal Vikas Yojana, as many as 1,078 people have been trained so far and 761 are undergoing training. Out of these trained people, 342 people have also been placed. All courses for skill development of youth are National Skills Qualification Framework (NSQF) compliant.

What are main features of the mission?
We are the very first state in the country which started training of domestic help ers. To understand National Skills Qualification Framework, Jharkhand Government has enabled various departments for skilling the youth of the state.

Has there been any assessment of the best performing district or districts?
As this is the pilot phase of the skill development mission and the target numbers are low. No such assessments are being conducted. But these assessments will be done in the main phase of the mission.

How are you identifying trainees and monitoring the overall progress of the scheme?
The training partners are having the backing of district administrations to provide counselling and training to the trainees. For monitoring the overall progress, we have a robust monitoring portal, “Hunar” that puts all the skill development activities of all the departments at one platform. Other than the monitoring portal, there are teams at district and state-levels to monitor the progress of scheme.

What challenges do you foresee and what significant role NGOs can play in that?
The biggest challenge is to motivate and mobilise people for joining the training sessions and then to choose the suitable ones for as per the course and people’s strengths. Another problem is that the people are unaware about it. After implementation of the mission completely, establishing training centers, managing those centers and managing the human resource will be another big challenge.
Various NGOs along with 42 training providers from government have also been empanelled with the mission to help with mobilisation too.n

In an exclusive interview with Shivani Tyagi of Elets News Network (ENN), Jayant Krishna, Chief Operating Officer, National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), shared the vision, mission and role of NSDC in skill development across the country. He said the effort is to overcome all the challenges and establish India as the skill capital of the world.

What was the drive behind establishing NSDC and what are its mandatory roles for skill development in India?
NSDC facilitates or catalyses skill initiatives that can potentially have a multiplier effect as opposed to being an actual operator in this space. In doing so, it strives to involve the industry in all aspects of skill development.
The approach is to develop partnerships with multiple stakeholders and build on current efforts, rather than undertaking too many initiatives directly, or duplicating efforts currently underway. To scale up efforts, necessary to achieve the objective of skilling/up skilling 150 million people by 2022, the NSDC strives to develop ultra-low cost, high-quality, innovative business models; attract significant private investment; ensure that its funds are largely “re-circulating”; i.e. loan or equity rather than grant; create leverage for itself and build a strong corpus. Keeping this in mind, the NSDC plays three key roles:
Funding and incentivising: In the near term this is a key role. This involves providing financing either as loans or equity, providing grants and supporting financial incentives to select private sector initiatives to improve financial viability through tax breaks, etc. The exact nature of funding (equity, loan and grant) will depend on the viability or attractiveness of the segment and, to some extent, the type of player (for-profit private, nonprofit industry association or non-profit NGO). Over time, the NSDC aspires to create strong viable business models and reduce its grant-making role.
Enabling support services: A skills development institute requires a number of inputs or support services such as curriculum, faculty and their training, standards and quality assurance, technology platforms, student placement mechanisms and so on. The NSDC plays a significant enabling role in some of these support services, most importantly and in the near-term, setting up standards and accreditation systems in partnership with industry associations.
Shaping/creating: In the nearterm, the NSDC will proactively seed and provide momentum for large-scale participation by private players in skill development. NSDC will identify critical skill groups, develop models for skill development and attract potential private players and provide support to these efforts.

What is your vision for Skill India initiative?
Our vision is to realise Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision to make India, the world’s skill capital. The idea is to reap India’s demographic dividend it currently enjoys making India the most powerful human resource nation across the world. A large part of India’s skilled work force is in unorganised sector, which needs to be formally recognised on transnational standard and industry scale. Henceforth the target is to skill 40.2 crore youth by 2022, in which 10.63 crore will be fresh entrants.

What are your plans for skill development in India and how much you have achieved so far?
We have set a target of skilling 6.06 million youth in 2016. To achieve our target, we have expanded our ecosystem by scaling up our Sector Skill Councils to 41 and to 269 training partners.
NSDC has further expanded its network with more than 30 universities, 3000 schools, various state governments, PSU’s and big corporates to help us providing the skill training to the youth and making them industry ready and thereby achieving the target.

What are the challenges to make Skill India a reality, what will be NSDC’s role?
The biggest challenge is the aspiration and respect for skills, among the youth. The youth must understand the difference that a skill development training brings to their life that a degree alone cannot bring. Even today, the youth does not feel that skill training should be an essential part of their curriculum and they must acquire it to be job ready.
Another challenge that we have is vocationalisation of education and implementation of national skill qualification framework in collaboration with school’s education and higher education. We are actively ensuring delivery of standards across all initiatives and bridging the gap between the industry, the academia and the corporates to build and sustain a cohesive skill ecosystem for the youth of our country, make them employable and ensure jobs to them.
Enough awareness needs to be imparted on the courses available under vocational education and how they can help transform an individual’s life.
Industry needs to intensify funding part of the training cost as an investment for skilling/up-skilling its own manpower and adopt skill development as a significant component under their CSR efforts. I am confident that with adequate support from the industries and corporates, ‘India can surely become a skill capital of the world.

The idea is to reap India’s demographic dividend it currently enjoys making India the most powerful human resource nation across the world. A large part of India’s skilled work force is in the unorganised sector, which needs to be formally recognised on transnational standard and industry scale.

What are your plans of action for Jharkhand?
NSDC has been working closely with the states skill mission of Jharkhand to promote skill development in the region. Till date NSDC has trained around 75,000 candidates in the state.
Our detailed skill gap study in the region to identify the industry requirement and the local aspirations of the youth clearly shows the current demographic and economic profile of Jharkhand, presents huge opportunity for manpower skilling. Working age population is estimated to grow from 203.72 lakhs in 2011 to 237.78 lakhs in 2017. Itis envisaged further to grow up to 271.70 lakhs in 2022, implying entry of about 46.07 lakh persons to the workforce during the period (2012 – 2022). About 75% of the supply of manpower will be in minimally skilled category and the rest about 25% of the supply will in skilled and semiskilled category. Incremental manpower demand in Jharkhand is estimated to be about 43.88 lakhs during the period 2012-22 including 32.52 lakhs in organized sectors and 11.35 lakhs in unorganized sectors. During the period 2012-22, the demand supply gap of the state is expected to be about (-) 2.19 lakhs. There will be manpower deficit in skilled and minimally skilled category. The state needs to additionally skill about 5.8 lakh persons over the next 10 years to meet the demand of skilled manpower. If we examine the incremental manpower gap for the period 2012-17, the incremental demand supply gap is only about (-) 0.13 lakhs. The incremental deficit of manpower in skilled and semi-skilled category is about 3.24 lakhs, which can be met by skilling the excess manpower in the minimally skilled category.
Youth aspirations in the state suggest that vocational training is perceived to be suitable for economically poor students. The students opting for vocational training in the state have a preference for government jobs over private jobs. Most of the youth preferred employment with government organisations like Railways and Public Sector Undertakings like SAIL, DVC etc. The most important reason for such a preference is job security and stable career. In line with the same, recently an International Skill Center (IISC) has been launched in the state of Jharkhand, to address skill requirement of those who plan to migrate to foreign countries for jobs which will support the youth in getting foreign placement. The proposed IISC will be set up through the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and implement the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) and Pravasi Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PKVY).

With big players from the corporate sectors coming to invest in Ranchi, the city is all set to implement the smart city projects and take this beautiful city at the top of Smart Cities in India. In an exclusive interview with Elets News Network’s Shivani Tyagi and Manish Arora, Ranchi Municipal Commissioner, Prashant Kumar revealed his strategy for achieving this goal. Excerpts:

What is your vision for Smart City Mission?
Jharkhand has a number of reputed institutions like BIT Mesra, Birsa Munda Agricultural University, Xavier’s Institute of Social Service (XISS) and many more. These institutes attract a lot of students across the globe and therefore it is a challenge for us to make Ranchi into a Smart City. People would opt for Ranchi or Jharkhand as a whole if we can provide them with good infrastructure, transport, safety and health facilities. Smart City Mission needs step by step intervention and we are making the advancements accordingly.
We realize that until and unless we bring public transportation at center stage, transport issues cannot be solved. We are planning to widen the roads and bring in high technology solutions so that higher vehicle infl ow will not create a ruckus on roads. For safety on roads, we are installing CCTV and PTZ cameras. We are also launching an app called Ranchi one app, which will be a one point solution to all traffi c related queries. This will give information on chocked and the most polluted routes.
Ranchi is the only one among other smart cities to opt for green fi elds. Ranchi has 7000 acres of unused land out of which 2000 acres of land has been taken by government of Jharkhand for developing the core capital area.

What are your plans for attracting IT companies, industries and amusement parks to Ranchi?
We are planning to develop the river front and transform it into continuous river park. We also have plans for setting up a huge amusement park in Jharkhand; this will boost the tourism. Three renowned universities are also planning to set up their campuses in Jharkhand. We have already received the Letter of Intent (LOI) from the department of higher education & technical education JW Marriott Group had also approached us and showed their interest in Ranchi. They have sent us a Letter of Intent (LOI), saying that we want to put up a fi ve star hotel and are striving for a land. Tata group has also requested us for a land for setting up their corporate office in Ranchi. We have a similar request from Reliance Jio as well.

Where do you see Ranchi in next two years and what are your plans for SPV?
Two years is a short span, give me five years and we will resolve all the major issues concerning to traffic. We are going to make 7 acre of Eco Park with latest facilities. This will also act as a water harvesting source. We are taking sustainable measures in making waste water management.
SPV will complete soon and we also have cabinet’s approval. All the directors have signed the memorandum and it is going to be registered in RAC in a week’s time. It’s a joint venture between State and Municipal Corporation.

What is your plan for attracting IT companies?
We are planning to bring professionals from the IT sector on board. We are trying to hire one PMC or PMU. This will further help us in hiring other consultants, domain consultants, contractors. We have one big PMU with one consultant as our strategy partner and we are developing the whole thing not as a project but as modules.

What are the major initiatives taken under Swachh Bharat Mission by your organisation?
We have sanctioned 30,000 individual toilets out of which 2000 have completed. We have 50 community and public toilets and orders for refurbishment of 280 community and public toilets have been given. Apart from the solid waste management we have assigned the work to Essel Infra and Hitache .These companies will start the work from 2nd October. We are investing around 77 crore rupees as capital investment to make a quantum improvement in the city. We will then go for 100 per cent door to door collection and processing of waste. Presently we are not dumping waste, we dump it in the plant, burn the waste and create energy.