rime Minister Narendra Modi will unveil a clutch of skill development initiatives on Monday aimed at skilling unemployed youth and also lay the foundation stone of the Indian Institute of Skills in Kanpur. "Apart from launching 31 Kaushal Kendras which will serve as skilling centres and target mainly unemployed youth for training purposes, the Prime Minister will also inaugurate an exhibition named Kaushal Mahotsav," a senior official in the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship said.
"The PM will also lay the foundation stone for the Indian Institute of Skills in Kanpur which will focus on providing industrial training," the official added.
The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship is also set to enter into a strategic partnership with the leather and textiles industry in Kanpur to place one lakh youth under the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana. Moreover, the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme will also be launched formally, the official said.
The Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Kendras are state-of-the-art Model Training Centres (MTCs) which the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship intends to establish in every district of the country. The model training centres envisage to create benchmark institutions that demonstrate aspirational value for competency based skill development training.
They would focus on elements of quality, sustainability and connect with stakeholders in skills delivery process. The centres will transform from a mandate driven footloose model to a sustainable institutional model.
The UPA government to its credit had launched the Student Training and Assessment Reward (STAR) scheme to achieve this goal under the aegis of the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) in 2013. However, ground reports suggest that the scheme never really took off. But the NDA government has streamlined, revamped the scheme and launched it as the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY).
Moreover, as the world has become less autarkic and immigration increases—despite all the rhetoric against it—there is no such concept as “over-supply” of skills, at least at the more basic skill set level, anymore. Human capital can be developed on roughly two axes of education and experience. In some developed countries, investment in formal education by itself may have hit diminishing returns as substantial enhancement of human capital happens more through on-the-job learning.
But India is still far from exhausting the growth possibilities that accompany having a citizenry that is at least functionally skilled with specific technical and communication capabilities—to get onto the job learning ladder, one has to get a formal job first. As China becomes a middle-income country and its working age population contracts along with that of Europe and Japan, India has a unique opportunity to leverage its young population. It is a tired cliché by now, but is nonetheless true—if we do not capitalize on our demographic dividend, it may end up becoming an unmitigated disaster.
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