Players need to cater to unorganised sector also: Meera Shenoy
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 unorganized labor, they will not capitalize on the whole opportunity.
To understand this sector better, one needs to look at the urban-non-poor as one sector and the rural-tribal-poor as another sector. Unfortunately, many players in this industry are looking at the low-hanging fruit only in the urban-non-poor sector. While in India, 70% of the population represents the rural-tribal-under-privileged-disabled youth, it is difficult to go into these markets as youth there do not have the capability to pay and so it becomes difficult to make a sustainable business model. The problem of sourcing youth occurs because all the players in this industry are trying to capitalize only on people who can pay, which represents a very small percentage of the 500 million people that need to be skilled.