In 1975, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi made increasing the number of apprentices in India the 20th point in her 20-point programme. Unfortunately, this interesting prioritisation of learning-by-doing and learning-while-earning failed because it did not involve legislative changes to the Apprentices Act of 1961. Among many toxic provisions, the Act prescribes jail for CEOs whose companies do not comply; so we either should have 5,000 CEOs in jail or have 15 million apprentices. India has neither. The Lok Sabha recently passed amendments to the Apprentices Act that will shift employers from being hostages to volunteers and have the potential to increase the number of apprentices in India by a factor of 50. Yet opposition parties?interestingly led by Indira Gandhi?s party?recently said that they would block these amendments in the Rajya Sabha. This blocking of the overdue healing of a powerful vehicle for skilling and employment amounts to declaring war on young people.

My obsession with apprenticeships began at a job fair in Jaipur eight years ago; 35,000 kids had shown up at 7 am, and by 3 pm I was tired so I told the kids that if you don?t have work experience I can?t talk to you. The 200 kids surrounding me were disappointed and left, but one of them?a smart kid called Rajesh?said I am not going to go and stand right here. His reply to me was, ?Everybody tells me they won?t hire me without work experience, but how do I get work experience without a job?? I didn?t have an answer so we hired him. But it also became obvious that Rajesh?s problem was the lack of apprenticeships and this man-made disaster that could be fixed.

For context, one state in Australia (Queensland) has more than 25,000 employers engaging apprentices; the whole of India only has 25,000. We only have

3 lakh (0.3 million) apprentices in India while Germany has 3 million, Japan 10 million and China 20 million. The OECD recently identified subsidising apprenticeships as having the highest returns on government spending; imagine if some of the

R2 lakh crore spent on MGNREGA went towards subsidising apprenticeships.

India?s current apprenticeship regime has many problems. Non-engineering graduates?80% of the total?are policy orphans neither covered by the labour ministry nor the HRD ministry. The regulatory regime is awkwardly fragmented between the two and state governments and requires multiple permissions and filing. There is no provision for national approval and services are largely unrepresented. The Act is unattractive for employers because it micro specifies duration, location, trade, etc, and suffers low awareness and trust. It requires employers to construct theoretical training facilities within their premises. It has no connectivity with the National Education Qualification Framework, Sector Skill Councils or Employment Exchanges. The amendments passed systematically tackles these birth defects and will not only allow the current programmes of the ministry of labour and the ministry of HRD to scale but also allow the emergence of newer life forms with innovative connections between the world of practice and theory.

These amendments are also crucial to the emergence of vocational universities in India. Vocational universities are different from normal universities in three ways: (1) they pray to one god?employers; (2) they have a qualification corridor with mobility between three-month certificates, one-year diplomas, two-year associate degrees, and three-year degrees; (3) they have three different classrooms with equal academic credit?online, physical and on-the-job. India?s 30% GER target needs new connections between apprenticeships and with higher education. The 150 lakh kids who fail class 10 and 12 every year have no on-ramps into higher education; marrying apprenticeships with distance education could be a powerful vehicle. Academic credit for apprenticeships will create a new genre of classrooms with much higher speed of expansion than traditional classrooms. An apprenticeship system with many more employers engaged will also allow experimenting with diverting government money currently spent on poor-value-for money programmes to the higher employment outcomes of on-the-job-training. The Massive Open Online Courses have been a disappointment so far in terms of engagement and completion rates, but marrying them with apprenticeships could be important to tackle India?s impossible trinity of cost, quality and scale. In a country with low signalling value of degrees, apprenticeships will allow employers to take employees for a test drive and enable better matching.

Skilling our youth is important to reaping our demographic dividend?the 10 lakh kids joining the labour force every month for the next 20 years. While we have made considerable progress in expanding school and higher education capacity, the employability of these students has been uneven, suspect and often fatal. This is further complicated by the market failure in financing skill development; employers are not willing to pay for training or candidates but are willing to pay for trained candidates; candidates are not willing to pay for training but for jobs; banks or microfinance institutions are not willing to lend for training; and training companies are unable to fill up their classroom. The reform agenda for skills is large: converting employment exchanges to career centres, creating a market for vocational training loans, creating a qualification corridor that allows vertical mobility, and much else. But the most important reform is making the system self-healing with apprenticeships because it is almost impossible to predict where jobs will be in the future; a US academic study concluded that 50% of the jobs advertised in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s did not exist in the decade before that. I guess this will not be different for India.

India is just coming out of a decade of economic experimentation where the state was placed at the heart of poverty reduction. But skills and jobs murder poverty in a way that no subsidy ever can. The Rajya Sabha will soon have to make the false choice between politics and India?s youth. I hope they choose wisely.

The author is chairman, Teamlease Services