While the DMK wrangles with the Congress over lucrative Cabinet berths, top strategists in charge of the government formation exercise are working out the contours of a proposed brand new ministry that will be focused exclusively on skill development.

?The new ministry will be carved out of the ministries of human resources development, labour & employment, as well as 15 others with skill development departments and cells focused on their respective sectors,? said a senior government official, who declined to be named. The Prime Minister?s office is understood to be fleshing out details of the proposal.

The concept of a skill development ministry is learnt to have came up after DMK chief M Karunanidhi reportedly rejected the Congress offer of the labour & employment portfolio. That ministry has an annual budget of just Rs 800 crore for 2009-10. By contrast, nearly Rs 3,000 crore has been earmarked for technical education and over Rs 28,000 crore for general education, parts of which would be reallocated to the new ministry.

Moreover, big-ticket expenditure is already underway on skill development through the public-private partnership route and significant increases in outlays are on the anvil. At the same time, the UPA is expected to move ahead with its plans to relax norms for the entry of foreign universities and education providers in its second term.

Irrespective of whether this piques the DMK?s interests, delivering on the ministry?s mandate would be vital as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has often stressed that India must impart employable skills to the masses in order to capitalise on its demographic dividend of a large working population. Some 92 million jobs need to be created during the 11 th Five-Year Plan to achieve employment for all.

The UPA already has several initiatives on this front: a Skill Development Initiative that aims to train a million persons annually; a National Skill Development & Vocational Education Mission; and a National Skill Development Policy that was approved as recently as February this year.

Apart from upgrading the country?s 1,896 Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs), the National Skill Development Mission envisages setting up 1,500 new ITIs and 50,000 skill development centres through public-private partnership to train around 10 million people a year. Of the 12.8 million new entrants to labour force each year, the capacity of skills and vocational training institutions is currently only 2.5 million.

In its first innings, the UPA government had carved out of the HRD ministry a new ministry for women & child development.