Many educated but few employable youth
It is ironical that only towards the end of its second term in power, the UPA Government has realised the urgent need to empower the country's young population which comes of age to join the workforce. On Tuesday, Mr S Ramadorai, Chairman of the National Skill Development Agency, lectured in Pune on the importance of ‘Skilling the Nation', if India were to leverage its demographic dividend as the key to fuelling economic growth in the immediate future. Yet, in the past nine years the regime has done next to nothing in this regard. It has taken few concrete steps to effectively educate the country's youth and more specifically give them the vocational training that would allow them to contribute significantly to the economy. Instead, the Government has chosen the easy way out and over the years set up many committees and councils (some of which have been reportedly disbanded) for the purpose, lest it is accused of inaction. The organisation that Mr Ramadorai heads is, of course, one of them, apart from the National Skill Development Corporation, which is a public-private initiative, the Prime Minister's National Centre for Skill Development and the Skill Development Board. A National Skill Policy was also released in 2009 but there has been no assessment of how it has been implemented, if at all.
It may be tempting to write this off as the result of a large and ineffective Government machinery whose left hand does not know what the right is doing, but take a look at the numbers to understand the gravity of the situation. Presently, 54 per cent of India's 1.2 billion people is under the age of 25, and 300 million are expected to enter the workforce by 2025 (at which point, Indians will make up a quarter of the global workforce). However, a measly seven per cent of the Indian labour force is currently in the organised sector and only a fraction of that has professional education; the bulk of the remaining 93 per cent in the unorganised sector receives almost no formal training at all. Compare this to Japan where 80 per cent of the workforce receives formal training, and to South Korea where the figure is as high as 96 per cent — and it is clear how far behind India trails. Even in China, where population and poverty are major challenges for the Government, as many as 90 million people enrol in vocational courses. In India, the National Skill Development Corporation is struggling to offer skill development courses to just 5.5 million people every year, and its stated goal of training 500 million by 2022 is a fantasy at best and a delusion at worst. Then there is the case of the educated-but-unemployable; Mr Ramadorai believes only 25 per cent of India's engineers, for instance, are good enough to hold a job. If only the Government would listen and invest in the youth, the most precious national resource, India would have a better chance to become the economic powerhouse that it hopes to be.