Sreelatha Menon: The missing students

The flagship skilling programme of the government leaves out the disabled

The country is now in the midst of striving for a target of 15 million skilled persons annually and 500 million by 2022.

How many of them are to be persons with disabilities?

These targets for skilling were set by the National Skill Development Policy that materialised during the last few years. The policy reflects the spirit of the Persons with Disabilities Act, which provides a three per cent quota for the disabled in government jobs.

However, the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), which was set up to fulfil the policy goals, has so far not considered it necessary to ensure that at least some of those who get skilled are persons with disability. NSDC is a public-private-partnership of the finance ministry mandated to skill 150 million by 2022 in 20 focus sectors identified by the government and the unorganised segment.

Persons with disabilities make up for about six per cent of the country’s population. Just 38 per cent of these are employed in comparison to about 66 per cent of those who are not disabled, according to the ministry of social justice and empowerment.

The policy did not leave out the disabled either.

It says the current level of participation of persons with disabilities in skill programmes is very low, despite guidelines of reserving three per cent of the seats for them. The guidelines apply only to the government sector.

The policy, however, neither gives any target for skilling them nor suggests that the quota in jobs should also be reflected in skilling. It merely states that people with varying degrees of physical and mental disabilities will be provided with appropriate adjustment and skills training to bring them in the economic mainstream and make them productive citizens. It further mentions the need to expand the facilities for people with disabilities and provide reasonable accommodation that enables them to access the facilities through suitable transport and building designs. It is specific only regarding doubling the number of vocational rehabilitation centres in the 11th Plan. NSDC has been signing Memoranda of Understanding with many private sector skilling institutes towards achieving the 15 million annual target.

But the agreements don’t have any clause to ensure inclusion. Deputy Chief Commissioner Disabilities T D Dhariyal agrees there was a gap in the implementation of the skilling policy, and it went against the spirit of the People with Disabilities Act. The Government of India has committed about Rs 2,500 crore towards the corpus for NSDC.

When asked about this gap in its programme, NSDC says it did have a partnership with a competition on entrepreneurial ideas by disabled persons held annually by the ministry of social justice.

As for leaving out the disabled from its main skilling projects, it has no answers.

Charity is not what the people with disabilities expect. They want mainstream schools, mainstream skilling classes and mainstream jobs. The skilling channel that has been opened through NSDC could have been a way to enable the kind of inclusion that the National Skill Development Policy envisages. On the non-governmental front, efforts are being made here and there. For instance, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, along with some NGOs like Cheshire Disability Trust and Accenture Trust, launched a job portal for disabled called Jobability.com. Accenture Trust has a programme to skill at least 25,000 disabled persons by 2015. Cheshire Trust itself has such programmes for skilling and placement.

When it comes to the disabled people, what a blind poet once said may not necessarily hold true; that they also serve who stand and wait. For the wait may never come to an end.