People Matters

Who pays for skilling 500mn People?

By Ester Martinez, Managing Editor

Jun 1st 2011

The de facto accepted target by government and industry alike is that India has to skill 500 million people over the next 10 years to maintain a healthy 9 to 10 per cent growth. Herein lie both the opportunity and the challenge. In spite of the obvious demand for skilled workers, there is an inherent stigma with vocational training for most people. As my friend Anubhav Singh, banker, social observer and philosopher put it succinctly, in a country where education is undertaken for the sake of e... Read more »

Cover Story: India's Skilling Industry: In Need of Synchrony

Jun 1st 2011

What started as an academic theory in 2007 – that India will need to skill 500 million (50 crore) people by 2022 – is today a reasonable target accepted by Government, policy makers and industry. This has given birth to one of the larger entrepreneurial opportunities of today – a (projected) USD 100 billion ‘Skilling Industry’ that is attempting to bridge a humungous skills gap which needs serious closing down if the nation’s economy were to continue on its ... Read more »

Cover Story Interview: Amit Bhatia, Founder & CEO, Aspire India

Jun 1st 2011

This is an evolving industry and education is still in its initial stages. I think it is best to call it fragmented and unstructured. There are two or three drivers which are determining how the industry will evolve: first is the quality of students; there is a clear market demand for better quality education. Employers are demanding good quality education and are unfortunately not able to find the desired quality in candidates. As a result, they have stopped trusting their degree and run an ... Read more »

Cover Story Interview: Arun Maira, Member, Planning Commission, Govt. of India

Jun 1st 2011

If you look at the demographics of the world, one finds that those countries that are the richest in terms of the GDP per capita today, actually have a shortage of the human capital that they need to be able to sustain the economic growth. If you see the map, where the concentration of human capital sits in our country. Here is the opportunity. Could the people of India be the source of competitive advantage? One of the main reasons for the boom of IT and ITES in India was the availability of... Read more »

Cover Story Interview: Dilip Chenoy, CEO and MD, NSDC

Jun 1st 2011

In the employability industry, the players are the government, the private sector and the assessors. And now as we are expanding, there is a new kind of franchise market opening up in the traditional skill areas that never existed before. On an average, it costs about Rs. 5,000 to Rs. 9,000 in order to skill a person from a low to medium end skill, for example, a mobile phone repair skill, low-end IT skills, etc. Today, roughly around 5 to 6 million people are getting skilled in the country. T... Read more »

Cover Story Interview: Hari Menon, CEO, IndiaSkills

Jun 1st 2011

There are no standards in various things like curriculum design, the kind of success profiles we need to create post training, infrastructure assessment tools, etc. This is one of the first things that the industry needs to put in place. The Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of HRD are together trying to come out with a vocational qualification framework, but this would take some time to formulate and be exercised. A faster way to do that is for the industry to drive it. In the vocational ind... Read more »

Cover Story Interview: Manish Sabharwal, Chairman, TeamLease Services

Jun 1st 2011

Cost, quality and scale are the impossible trinity for any entrepreneur in skills. If you raise quality then you raise cost, but you need scale; if you raise scale, you have the danger of lowering quality while you lower cost. It is a linear programming optimization problem. When I went to Wharton it cost Rs 14,000 an hour, ISB is Rs. 8,000, IIM is Rs. 6,000 an hour and Rs. 3,500 an hour for IIT. We have to do this at Rs 200 an hour; you do not need more cooks, you just need a different recipe... Read more »

Cover Story Interview: Meera Shenoy, Executive Director, Centre for PwD Livelihoods

Jun 1st 2011

The skills industry composition has three important stakeholders - the government, the employers and the community. For the training provider, it is important to work with all three in order to scale operations. The present trend is of all organized players moving into the organized skilling sector. However, Indian statistics shows that almost 87% of the labor falls in the unorganized market. So until institutional players in the skilling field start thinking of ways to cater to the unorganize... Read more »

Cover Story Interview: Mukesh Sharma, CEO, CRISP

Jun 1st 2011

There is no doubt that there is a need to scale skill development in India. The Government has started many initiatives in this regard such as the Skill Development Mission and setting up of NSDC, and there is also a lot of fund allocation for various skill development projects. However, the last three years has seen the quality of candidates and training depleting. Although there are many training institutions and assessment empanelled by the government, quality remains a problem as trained c... Read more »

Cover Story Interview: Sanjeev Duggal, CEO and Director, Centum Learning

Jun 1st 2011

We first need to assess if there is an opportunity and if there is a real need. If you look at both perspectives, the answer is yes; but the question is who has this need? Both the government and the industry need people to be skilled. The Government ought to leverage India’s demographic dividend but currently there are several segments which are not a part of the India’s growth trajectory such as the tribal groups, majority of rural population and BPL(Below Poverty Line) youth in... Read more »