India had always been viewed as an agrarian economy, what this meant was that the agricultural sector and its allied activities had been for the longest time the mainstay of the Indian economy, providing the lion?s share of contribution to the GDP and employment to more than 60% of India?s labour.

However, change seems to be slowly creeping into the economy now. Agriculture has now lost its position of being the largest contributor to the GDP, although it is still provides employment to about half of India?s workforce. This is perfectly in sync with the trend of development that happens in other countries, albeit with a little difference. What happens generally is that as a country develops, there seems to be a shift of labour and resources from agriculture to manufacturing, and once the economy becomes a high income one, the services sector becomes the most important contributor to both the GDP and employment. But India seems to have bypassed the manufacturing field and directly arrive at the services field. It has now become a knowledge economy from an agrarian economy.

While our competence in services might be reassuring, the picture is incomplete at best. Despite the astounding number of graduates that we spin out each year, very few have the right skill sets to be ?employable? in the industry, services or otherwise, so that on the job training becomes imperative. The government has drawn up ambitious plans to set up more ITIs and duly upgrade the existing ones in order to tap them as the primary nursery of a skilled workforce. The industry, too, hires unskilled and semi-skilled workers and imparts them the specific skills needed in particular areas of work, thereby playing the role of a trainer at a mass scale itself. However, private industry is guided by real economics and is usually inclined to invest only so much in training and skill development as is required to meet its short-term requirements and is highly cost-sensitive. This is clear signal that somewhere our education system fails the students. Perhaps it is time to fix this.

The author is MIB 2009-11 student of Delhi School Of Economics