Training focus on wrong sectors, says NSDC chief

Capacity provisioning of the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), the public-private partnership under the Ministry of Finance, was "heavily bent" towards sectors such as information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services (ITeS), while mass-based sectors such as construction and infrastructure were ignored, NSDC Chairman S Ramadorai said at the 6th Partners' meeting here.

"Sectors such as IT, ITeS, BFSI are quite mature by themselves. We need to pay more attention to the less-developed, but more voluminous sectors, which may be more challenging to penetrate. But those are the kind of efforts NSDC wishes to support. I would exhort the entire community not to lose sight of such sectors generating mass employment," Ramadorai said.

"In the next five months, we have to accelerate and train 660,000 candidates, that is, about 130,000 candidates every month. While there are training partners who have exceeded their targets, there are others who have very worrying shortfalls," he added. He requested all training partners to renew their focus and scale up operations.

NSDC has set a target to train 150 million, 30 per cent of India's overall requirement, by 2022. So far, it has commissioned 47 per cent of this target capacity. Currently, the NSDC programme is being run across 357 districts, through 2,202 training centres. NSDC has committed Rs 2,124 crore towards skill development across all its partners.

Ramadorai said most courses being implemented were a month long, the least required by the scheme. "Is this pedagogically sound? I also get the sense that the same course has fee variance when included in the STAR scheme. This is not quite desirable," he said.

The programme had to be aligned to the National Occupational Standards and the qualification packs defined by SSCs, he said, adding this would standardise training efforts and bring these in line with industry requirements. Courses that weren't aligned to National Occupational Standards would be discontinued by NSDC's training partners, according to NSDC chief executive Dilip Chenoy.