‘There is a need to build skills within the workforce’

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: Festina Lente, Latin for ‘make haste slowly’ has been the approach towards skills development in India, largely because of the scale of the task as compared with other countries such as Germany, Singapore and Brazil, where it has been successful and also because of the complexity of stakeholders involved. For skills development to evolve successfully in India, there needs to be coordination between industry, government, education institutes and associations such as Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). B Santhanam, chairman, CII’s National Committee on Skills, Human Resources and Industrial Relations, in a tete-a-tete with FE’s Malvika Chandan, gives an overview of skill-development in India and how even private companies have considerably enhanced the capability of its employees by imparting government-funded vocational training. Excerpts:

When did the need for skills’ development come to the forefront?

If one were to trace it back to a particular year, I would say around 2003 when industry confidence was strong, engineers were in big demand and the BPO sector was booming. And then closer to 2004 there was a lot of input from companies regarding shortage of talent. As part of CII, we had got some great research back then on skills development from ICRA, the credit rating company’s management division called iMACS and Tata Institute of Social Sciences, which did some path-breaking work for us. Companies were facing a scenario wherein productivity increases was not matching the growth rate because of a shortfall in the people required.

This scenario of jobless growth continued through 2003 and 2004 and it was in 2005 when politicians sat up and took notice of this, and realised that it was a great opportunity to build skills and employability within the workforce. The emphasis was moving from employment to employability. The government envisaged in 2006 that up to 80 million jobs could be created over the next decade and the output by the education and vocational systems combined do not meet that requirement.

What specific initiatives have the government and industry made towards skill development?