Devise way to capture placement figures on NCS portal, tells House panel

Committee dissatisfied with ministry's response that NCS portal has data on shortlisted candidates, instead of placement figures

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour, in its latest report submitted to the Lok Sabha Speaker earlier this month, has urged the labour ministry to develop a “robust verification mechanism” to ensure that the number of placements reported on the National Career Service (NCS) portal accurately reflects actual employment outcomes in the country.

 

“The committee desires that a robust verification mechanism be developed and implemented to ensure that the number of placements reported on the NCS portal accurately reflects actual employment outcomes,” the House panel observed.

 

The standing committee also expressed its “dissatisfaction” with the labour ministry’s response that the NCS portal already allows employers to update the list of shortlisted candidates.

   

“The Directorate General of Employment is capturing the count of shortlisted candidates from job fairs conducted in model career centres. Further, the NCS portal has a feature wherein employers can update the shortlisted candidates,” the ministry had submitted.

 

Launched in 2015, the labour ministry’s NCS portal is a one-stop platform providing career-related services, including job listings from the private and government sectors, information on online and offline job fairs, job search and matching, career counselling, vocational guidance, and details of skill development courses and employability enhancement programmes, among other things.

 

According to the latest data available until July this year, the portal has over 4.8 million active employers and more than 4 million active vacancies.

 

The committee further urged the labour ministry to develop a digital confirmation system on the NCS portal to enable continuous updates of job placements by employers, along with ratings and incentives for those who consistently report actual hiring data. It also recommended adding a self-reporting feature for candidates who have found placements to “significantly enhance a more accurate assessment of the portal’s effectiveness in facilitating employment”.

 

The House panel also exhorted the labour ministry to devise more specific methods to ensure that employers compulsorily report vacancies. “The ministry is exhorted to come out with more specific methods whereby employers compulsorily report vacancies, thereby ensuring that the data is automatically updated. The progress achieved in this regard may be intimated to the committee within three months,” the report noted.

 

In addition, the committee reiterated its earlier recommendation and urged the ministry to work closely with the remaining states and Union Territories (UTs) that are yet to pre-publish the draft rules under the four new labour codes to facilitate their seamless and uniform implementation across the country.

 

The committee noted that any further delay in implementing the codes would “deprive workers, especially those in the unorganised sector, of the much-needed simplified and consolidated labour laws, enhanced social security, and improved working conditions”.