I have attempted to highlight, in this short note, the confused state of affairs pertaining to vocational education, wrong assumptions and faulty implementation in the Indian context. The assumptions are stated below:
- The original assumption and commitment of training (and surprisingly no placement) 500 million youth by 2022 has now been abandoned. Experts admit, in private, that this figure was highly exaggerated and had no factual basis or logic. Now the state of affairs is such that no one responsible in the government or its national bodies is prepared to come on record about how many are in fact going to be trained and placed. What is even more shocking is the fact that now the people in the know admit that they did not keep track of how many youths were placed in the industry. “We don’t want to chase any number. Whether it is 150 million by the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and 350 million by ministries—we are delinking it, not attaching any number,” said Rajesh Aggarwal, director-general of training and a joint secretary in the skills ministry.” What a poor reflection of our state of preparedness for such a critical objective.
- India has the largest pool of demographic dividends- its youth. Very often this has been enthusiastically proclaimed as our biggest asset. Again, it needs a reality check about its preparedness to contribute to national progress. The schooling system is so pathetic that the majority of the students drop out. Of course, for leaving the studies halfway through there are other compelling reasons such as poverty and the resultant lack of affordability. High rate of illiteracy, faulty pedagogy, unqualified teachers and you have an excellent recipe for disaster. Such ill-prepared youth then descend on the city in search of jobs. Lack of employment and fatal attraction for metro-style living gives rise to unmitigated crime. This is the reality. Therefore, the demographic dividend is actually an albatross.
- India’s so-called growth story needs a serious reality check. In economics, it is often, erroneously, assumed that the growth rate of GDP is linked to employment. Meaning thereby if the GDP increases it automatically results in a rise in employment as more and new jobs are created. So, a reduction in unemployment is directly related to growth in GDP. In 1962 Okun- the famous economist aptly summarized the relationship between growth and unemployment in a statistical formula. The law states that the relationship between growth to an increase in employment or a decrease in unemployment is not one-to-one. He postulated that a 1 per cent increase in the growth rate above the trend rate of growth (or the growth in potential output) would lead only to 0.3 per cent in the reduction of unemployment. Reversing the causality, a 1 per cent increase in unemployment will mean roughly more than a 3 per cent loss in GDP growth. This relationship implies that the rate of GDP growth must be equal to its potential growth just to keep the unemployment rate constant. To reduce unemployment, therefore, the rate of GDP growth must be above the growth rate of potential output. What India is witnessing today is Persistent Jobless Growth(PJG). Partly this is due to automation. If we look at the population between the age group of 25-45 we see a major trend of joblessness. What is worrying is that in the booming sector of IT, this trend is sharply visible. Most of the coding jobs for programmers are being taken over by machines. Every week hundreds of IT workers are laid down without giving any notice. That trend may be new to the IT sector but in many sectors, this has always been a common trend. A study by the Pew Research Centre Global Attitudes Project 2014 points out that for many countries in the world lack of employment opportunities is perceived as a major challenge. However, in India, we notice a very casual approach to tackling this critical issue. The Ministry of Skill Development is pumping into the market daily thousands of ill-trained youth where there are no jobs. That’s a sure recipe for disaster of great magnitude.
- Growthless Jobs: Unfortunately, the focus of the ministry largely has been to train the youth on low-level or what I call Level I type of skills. The need of the hour is to go to Levels IV and above. Let me just take one sector to highlight the issue of growthless jobs. Many training organisations in India train the youth in Sewing Machine Operation. This is popularly known as SMO training. So, after 240 hours of training these youth migrated from the villages to the metro cities for jobs as Sewing Machine Operator. These boys and girls have to live in horrible conditions in which exploitation by landlords is very common. I have personal knowledge of these workers' plight, particularly in Delhi and Gurgaon. They have to live in shanties with tin roofs. During peak summer, the temperature is above 45 degrees. In the workplace, sexual harassment is very normal. Overtime is a tool used by supervisors to exploit female workers. They get paid what is commonly known as minimum wage and NOT living wage. Even when the cost of living index goes up they are paid only the difference between the actual wage and the revised wage. Thus, for their life, they are stuck in a growth-less job. In reality, this is no different from a labourer who goes to the Middle East in search of a lucrative job and after handing over his passport loses his identity and becomes a bonded worker for life. The growth only seems to be happening to the owners of such establishments who manage the enterprise in the most ruthless manner while living in the laps of luxury.
To conclude time has come to seriously introspect the entire direction of vocational training. Focus on volumes with ill-equipped infrastructure, poorly trained instructors and ill-conceived pedagogy is bound to result in worthless jobs being offered and getting stuck for life. More and more innovation is the name of the game.
