A recent survey by a leading national daily brought out some glaring facts about the skill development initiatives sponsored by the Government of India through its apex delivery instrument National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC). A few of the critical points highlighted were as follows:

  • Most of the training institutes lacked proper infrastructure and the quality of the trainers left a lot to be desired.
  • There was no verification done for over 500,000 students casting serious doubts about whether they were trained or the numbers were fudged.
  • As per information accessed under the Right to Information Act the data from NSDC showed that over 400,000 students were trained by ten institutes out of which four were from the National Capital Region (NCR). One institute claimed that they had trained over 30,000 students in one year averaging 2500 candidates every month. However, this institute refused to divulge how they were able to train so many candidates. Obviously, indiscriminate franchising must have happened. Surely this may not be an isolated occurrence as many fly-by-night operators have infested the system.

From these observations, a few conclusions are inescapable:

The focus, unfortunately, continues to be on numbers. Quantity and not quality have been the major cause of such a dismal picture.

Unfortunately, this is a typical Input-Output confusion. The ministry has to realise that the passing out students are input to the industry and not the Output. If the focus is on churning out thousands of barely trained youth it is a sure recipe for disaster.

There has to be some correlation between the output and the input value chain. It looks like the employment creation data and the numbers produced by the shady training institutes do not match.

It looks like India is falling into the trap of “catching up” syndrome. While countries such as Korea, Germany, and China have already embarked on level IV and V types of advanced vocational training India is still churning out Welders, Fitters and Sewing Machine Operators.

It's time to rethink the strategy, direction and ground realities to make a mid-course correction. If not done, a few years down the line we may be doing the post-mortem on why such an ambitious effort failed.