Transforming ITIs to suit industry needs

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: A billion people are not necessarily an asset. You better be skilled. When the concept of industrial training institutes (ITIs) was first formed after Independence, the intention was to bridge the skill gaps in the workforce by providing training to the youth in India. This intent holds true even today.

The fact that there is a need in India for skills development is long established. As the director general of CII, Chandrajit Banerjee correctly notes, “For every white collar job created, there are four corresponding blue collar jobs in the pipeline,” and therefore, progress would be a misnomer without paying attention to the training needs of these blue-collar workers.

According to the booklet brought out by CII in collaboration with pan-IIT Alumni, Getting Started – Unleashing Skilled India: Transforming ITIs Together, “Although ITIs (both public and private) are able to handle about 7 lakh people, the need is much deeper as studies have found that 44% of all workers are illiterate and another 23% had schooling only up to the primary level.”

The findings reveal that, “in the age group of 20-24 years, only 5% of the Indian labour force had vocational skills, which was much lower than other countries like Mexico, where it was as high as 28%.”

After Independence, the government mandated some 6,000 ITIs across India. About 4,000 were set up as private-sector ITIs and are referred to as Industrial Training Centres (ITC). The remaining 1,900 ITIs-plus, which were run initially by the government, but since have slowly transitioned into a private public partnership (PPP) model involving government, industry and educational institutes as equal stakeholders.

These 1,900-plus have focused primarily on imparting skills related to manufacturing and engineering with very little or no focus on developing skills for the construction industry or the service industry. The idea of transitioning these 1,900-plus institutes into a PPP-model with an Institute Management Committee (IMC) first emerged in the late 1980s. The government intentionally experimented with four ITIs in North India. This initial experiment proved successful and in 2005, the government replicated the late 1980s model coming up with the PPP model for the remaining of these 1,900 ITIs.