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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?
The first thing they did about 4 to 5 years ago was to work on reviving and refreshing the ITIs. They have done this in collaboration with the government, industry and with associations such as CII. However, there were certain gaps in the ITI system, like the need to be at least an eighth class pass to enroll in any of the programmes and also most of the programmes were two years in duration. Shorter, more focused programmes with specific outcomes were offered by the Modular Employable Skill Scheme, which has successfully bridged this gap of the ITIs.
Could you tell us a little about training imparted through this scheme?
Through this scheme one can get short term employment training of 200 to 600 hours across 300 trades covering 70% of the industry requirement. CII is putting a lot of weight behind this scheme because we see benefit in it. The training can be done by anyone registered as a vocational training provider and companies can also choose to conduct the training internally and get reimbursed by the government an amount of Rs 3,000 to Rs 10,000 per participant per month, depending on the complexity of the of the training imparted. What this scheme also does is address immediate needs and also change the dynamics of the equation by putting industry right in the heart of the training rollout. Our own company Saint Gobain has benefited from this facility wherein we conduct 21 working days of modular employability training for our logistics staff on industry safety and industry soft skills many of who have not had any significant prior training and after going through this training involving simulations, self learning modules, Q&A classroom formats we found a marked improvement in output of these employees. We have successfully trained 15,000 people over the past 7 to 8 years. The cost borne was about Rs 2.7 crore and largely government-funded. On completion of the training, attendees get a National Council Vocational Training Certificate thus making them more employable. The reason this format of skill training is not leveraged as much as it should be is because a lot of companies are not aware about the modular employable programme. There have been a lot of successful pilot level initiatives within the modular employable skill scheme in states such as Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Today while industry is affected by the economic slow down, the far-sighted companies will who look beyond 12 to 18 months will benefit if they take this opportunity in training their employees and building skill capability.
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