India's green sectors to employ 300,000 workers by 2022: ILO

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has estimated that 300,000 workers will be employed directly in the solar and wind energy sectors by 2022 to meet India's goal of generating 175 gigawatts of electricity from renewable sources.

"The potential for employment creation is conditional on the domestic capacity of solar module manufacturing and the establishment of vocational training programmes and certification schemes," said the World Employment Social Outlook 2018 report released by the ILO on Monday.

The employment in solar and wind energy sectors in 2022 would be nearly double the 154,000 similar jobs in 2009, it added citing estimates by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) and the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC)

The report questions assumptions that environmental actions to combat climate change would lead to steep job losses and asserts that new jobs in green sectors would more than make up for those that disappear.

It estimated that steps taken to limit global warming to two degrees centigrade would create 24 million new jobs worldwide by 2030 while leading to a loss of only six million jobs.

Only two petroleum-related sectors -- extraction and refining -- would see substantial losses of jobs running to more than a million.

The report warned that on the other hand unchecked climate change and global warming would result in a steep loss of jobs due to the effect on agriculture and loss of productivity because if illnesses.

The report said that India has set up a comprehensive framework for skills development "for green transition" to meet the growing workforce demand.

The Skills Council for Green Jobs is among the institutions created to promote workforce training, it said.

The report said that 26 new technical and vocational education and training (TVET) courses have been developed across the environmental sustainability sectors for a range of jobs with varying skill levels like water treatment plant helper, solar photovoltaic project manager and improved cooking stove installer.

In addition, private institutions have also developed 70 courses for environmental sustainability jobs, it said.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)

--IANS

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