This short note is to examine the assumption that skills education and training help reduce poverty. Firstly, I believe that the main objective of skills training is to identify the most suitable candidate for training- he or she need not be from the poorest strata of society. However many of the country’s flagship programs combined the poverty alleviation goals with skills training. This has resulted in many absolutely non-qualified and illiterate youth getting into the vocational stream making the classic negative Self Fulfilment Prophecy come true.
As we all know it was the Ministry of Rural Development of the Government of India(MoRD) that had a major role in starting programs that aimed at rural poverty reduction by providing vocational training to the below poverty line youth. But unfortunately, the entire focus was on getting the rural youth somehow to the metro cities. As it is the agriculture sector had lost its attractiveness and hordes of rural youth coming to the metro cities after 240 hours of perfunctory training created many social issues. The youth had great difficulty adjusting themselves to the urban setting. Many crimes in the metro cities were attributed to the migrating youth. It occurred to me that the focus was wrong. Migration is like a kidney transplant in which the body tends to reject it. The ideal solution would have been to identify suitable roles in the villages itself. In addition, many fly-by-night operators sprung up overnight and the so-called training centres started churning out students in thousands who were promptly rejected by the industry as being good for nothing. Fake data about students trained and placed forced the ministry to tighten the system. Again, here the ministry has gone overboard by creating a system of checks that is so complex that it will be next to impossible to follow them in its entirety. Then came the wonderful creation of the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) which assumed its role to be as a soft loan disbursement agency. It created a scheme of training certification named SMART which promptly turned into a scam. It started giving numbers that were seriously objected to by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG). The entire focus was on numbers in which quality was the main casualty. No data was made available as to where the candidates were placed. A proposal for setting up a centre took such a long time that defeated the very objective of providing timely training.
The government could have done a better job if it had just followed the most successful vocational training adopted by many European countries with some customization. I have been a keen observer of the German Vocational System. Its duel track system ensures rigour and has a very sound base to bring out the best in the youth. It creates a platform in which a student gets both theoretical and practical exposure to vocational training. The courses are broad and deep which effectively sharpens the skills unlike in India where some courses are for a few days! A welder or a plumber in a German school has to spend three years of rigorous training to become a world-class technician. The workbooks and worksheets are meticulously prepared to ensure that the students get a complete grounding into the mathematical base of the underlying principles. Again, in India, most of the so-called National Occupational Standards (NSS) are nothing but simple job descriptions. But I am digressing a bit from the main theme of this article. Are the programs helping the poorest of the poor? More importantly, should the programme focus on them or pick up the bright students irrespective of their economic status? In answer to this question, my comments are as follows:
The poorest youth are excluded from vocational skills training
I have been privy to many cases wherein the so-called below-poverty-line youth comes to join the training in a swanky mobile, displaying an expensive watch and showing his BPL card! The really needy and poor youth have no chance or reach. That is the harsh reality.
The formal training has little relevance to the needs of the industry.
In many instances the level and quality of the trainees is pathetic. They are semi-literate with no numerical or logical analytical skills. The training does not take this into account and has a very bookish approach. On the life skills training rather than understanding the complexities of fluid intelligence it focuses on very general topics such as communication, team building, leadership etc. NSDC has set up the Sector Skills Councils (SSC) as the bodies representing the industry. But unfortunately, most of these bodies have become largely irrelevant in meeting the real demands of the industry.
The Informal sector needs skilled youth but not enough traction is generated.
As it is well known the opportunities for jobs in the informal sector are very high but no careful planning or strategy is evident to attract the youth in this sector. All focus is towards the formal sector.
It is very difficult to set up an independent business with a trained youth in India
In all such skills training the idea was that some percentage of youth would start their own business. But in the absence of collateral, it is next to impossible to venture into setting up an enterprise.
Despite political rhetoric, the government has thus far failed to link training provision with the priorities of its growth strategy for the medium to long term. This is compounded by linking the issue of poverty alleviation to vocational training. My solution would be to delink the two, look for the potential candidates irrespective of their economic status, follow the proven German duel track model with customization and finally and most critically leave the obsession for numbers and instead focus on quality.
