Need out-of-the-box ideas on skill development, says Rudy

Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Rajiv Pratap Rudy on Thursday said the biggest challenge today is to create 'skillers' or those who can impart skill development training to the people.

"We need out-of-the-box ideas to channelize this great desire in the entire system to work on skill development," he said while addressing the Valedictory Session of the 11th India Health Summit organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry here.

For example, he said, we can create a National Nursing University to bridge the shortage of nurses in the health sector.

Rudy, who is also the Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs, pointed out that Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants skill development to be accorded high priority.

He said that there is a need for standardization of skill development programmes.

"We need to have some kind of certification and the biggest challenge is to create that," Rudy said.

"We need the right kind of assessors who can monitor or bring down these walls whether the training being given is what is required," he added. Otherwise, he stressed, the country will have a big workforce but a majority will not be employable as they don't have the right type of skills.

"We need to utilize the available infrastructure and have to make skill development programmes outcome-oriented," Rudy said, adding that the government is ready to partner with the private sector in this endeavour.

Welcoming the Minister, Dr. Naresh Trehan, Chairman, CII National Committee on Healthcare, and Chairman and Managing Director, Medanta-The Medicity, earlier said that the NGO, private and public sectors have thick firewalls between them.

"We need to make the effort to bring down these walls so as to make India a power in the healthcare sector," he added.

Dr. Trehan called for more efficient working across sectors and said that scalable efforts need to be made in this direction. He cited the CII programme that aims to impart skills to those in the health sector so that they can chart a 'knowledge-based professional progression path'.

To overcome the huge human resource shortage in the health sector, he said: "We are training 50,000 people in skill development."

The two-day CII summit with the theme, Health for All-Call to Action, was attended by government representatives, healthcare professionals and allied healthcare service providers among others.