The country?s target to take its steel capacity to 120 million tonne by 2019-2020 is likely to be severely hindered due to lack of skilled manpower with the estimated additional requirement for it crossing 2,20,000 per year.
While the national steel policy, approved by the government in 2005, focused on bringing about efficiency in production to bring down costs of manufacturing, it called for more number of skilled manpower, Tata Steel?s HR head BN Sarangi said.
For every million tonne per annum of capacity addition through greenfield projects, the required manpower is 20,200. For 1 mtpa of capacity through brownfield projects the requirement is limited to 10,000. But more than 50% of the targeted capacity will come from greenfield projects, and, hence, the need for additional manpower is high. In both brownfield and green field projects, 70% of the required manpower needs to have specialised skills, Sarangi said.
He said although the country has set a formidable target of achieving 120 million tonne (mt) of steel production by 2020 from a level of 54 mt at present, envisaging that per capita steel consumption would go up from a current level of 30 kg to 90 kg by then, it does not seems to be geared up to create proper skilled development centres for supplying human resources suiting the steel sector?s needs.
In another eight years, when India?s steel capacity is expected to reach 80 mtpa, more than 8,00,000 skilled people will be required to work in the sector. By that time there will be a comprehensive picture of the demand-supply gap, Sarangi said.
The Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) spread across the country have an intake capacity of 2.3 lakh every year but many of the seats remain under-utilitilised with only 1.50 lakh to 1.65 lakh students. Of the 92 trades taught across the ITIs, only 42 are relevant for the steel industry, Sarangi said. But there are many ITIs, which doesn?t offer a single course relevant to the steel sector.