Upgrading ITIs: Need to make vocational training truly aspirational

A ranking system may encourage private-sector ITIs to improve. But to be meaningful, the starting point needs to be convincing more young people to enrol and getting better job placement guarantees

The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship’s reported proposal to introduce a ranking of India’s Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) is a good one but urgently needs to be complemented by a significant upgrading of these institutions. The idea is to conduct annual rankings of ITIs on the lines of the National Institutional Ranking Framework for higher education to help students and potential employers to assess their quality. The idea is not new: In 2017, the Directorate General of Training had introduced a grading framework to make ITIs eligible for affiliation on the government portal, or financing via a World Bank programme, or for training instructors overseas. This, too, was a good idea but did not appear to make a difference in terms of improving the quality of the ITIs. The key problem is low demand, which creates a vicious circle of low quality.

India has about 15,000 ITIs, 78 per cent of them owned and managed by the private sector. Both categories of ITIs have low seat-utilisation rates. According to the National Council for Vocational Education and Training, private institutions have a seat utilisation of 43 per cent; government ones fare better at 57 per cent. The bulk of the trades on offer are for electricians, fitters, welders, and mechanics specialising in diesel machinery or electronics and computer operator and programming assistants. These are all skills that industry claims to need and, given the high youth unemployment, skills that young people should covet; yet 65 per cent of the seats available for electricians are unoccupied. A good part of the reason for such high vacancies, a 2023 study of ITIs by the NITI Aayog pointed out, is the low value society attaches to vocational education. ITI-trained professions appear less “aspirational” than those of doctors or engineers in India’s traditional social hierarchy of coveted professions.

Unlike China, where 42 per cent of upper-secondary-level students enrol in vocational training, or South Korea (18 per cent), or Indonesia (44 per cent), vocational enrolment in India is just 6 per cent. This low demand has its impact on training — just 36 per cent of sanctioned instructor positions are filled and only 15 per cent are trained in accordance with the guidelines. Few institutes care to engage industry experts as adjunct faculty to share the latest knowledge with students. Add to that dated infrastructure as a result of chronic underinvestment and curricula that are out of sync with the demands of the economy and the vicious circle of low demand creating low quality is complete. To be sure, ITI courses have responded to the updated demands of the economy; now of the 151 trades taught in ITIs, 64 are related to the services sector. But the disconnect between industry and institutes clearly prevails.

With the government planning to spend Rs 60,000 crore over five years to skill two million youth by upgrading 1,000 ITIs in a grand plan involving state governments and industry, many of these issues will need to be addressed. A ranking exercise may well encourage private-sector ITIs to improve but to be meaningful the starting point needs to be to convince more young people to enrol in them — and to get better guarantees of job placements.