Making Indian labour more employable

Making Indian labour more employable

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, recently launched an ambitious initiative to provide skills training to more than 400 million young people by 2022.

It aims to provide vocational and technical training to youth and create a more skilled workforce to help bridge the skills gap in India.

"China is the world's manufacturing hub and, India can aim to be the world's human resource capital," Mr Modi said.

A large part of India's labour force is unskilled and informal.

The gap between the skills employees have, and those that employers seek is a commonly cited problem in India, which adds nearly 12 million people to its workforce every day. Many of them can only hope for informal, sporadic work.

Surinder Singh, who has worked as a daily wage worker for the past 20 years, told the BBC: ''We get work for three to four days where we earn 250 to 300 rupees ($5 - 6; £2.5 -3) and then we have to find another job again."

Employers are hoping the government mission will help them get better labour that have skills that industry demands.

"It is so tough to find skilled labour that we sometimes have to hire inexperienced, straight-out-of-college graduates and then give them on-the-job training. We also have to get people from nearby villages, train them and arrange accommodation for them at our expense," Shweta Patil, who runs an auto parts manufacturing hub in the western Indian city of Pune, said.

Skills development and entrepreneurship efforts across the country have been highly fragmented so far. According to government data, only 2.3% of the workforce in India has undergone formal skills training as compared to 68% in the UK, 75% in Germany, and 52% in the US.

However, a number of companies, like Baba jobs, Nano jobs and Tech Mahindra, have also been trying to tackle this problem on a smaller scale.

The Tech Mahindra initiative, called the Saral Rozgar (easy employment) programme, maintains a job-seeker base of close to four million blue collar workers.

The database is open to potential employers from a range of companies, seeking to fill job vacancies.

The company has also begun imparting skills training to blue collar workers with a view to making them more employable in line with market demands.

"We have also started a Saral Shiksha (easy education) programme through which we are conducting vocational training to enable people to get trained on skills that the market requires. At the moment it is at a pilot stage but we plan to launch the programme soon," Jagdish Mitra, chief strategy officer of Tech Mahindra said.

According to figures available in the 2011 census, an estimated 104 million fresh entrants to the workforce will require skills training by 2022, while 298 million of the existing workforce will require additional training over the same period.

But the other challenge for the government, and one that has not been addressed by Mr Modi as yet, is that along with skills training the government will also need to create that many jobs for its young and employable population.

Source:BBCNEWS