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NEW DELHI: India could introduce a Vocational Training Act on the lines of the one in China, with the ministry of labour and employment working on the contours of the first of its kind initiative in the country to provide legal framework for the Narendra Modi-led NDA government’s Skill India programme that aims to provide quality training to millions of youths over the next seven years to make them employable.
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As a large number of youths enter the workforce every year, India needs to improve quality of training so it matches international standards, a senior ministry official said.
“We are currently studying the law on vocational education in China and plan to come up with our own legislation that will provide a framework for imparting vocational training in the country,” said the official, who did not wish to be named.
Countries such as Germany and China have dedicated laws for vocational training and the ministry is studying these to understand how a similar legislation best suited to India can be introduced in the country. “There is an incremental requirement of 347 million skilled manpower in 21 high growth sectors, including manufacturing sector, by the year 2022,” the ministry recently said in a reply to a Parliament question citing a study by the National Skill Development Corporation.
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In his budget speech, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had announced a new national programme called Skill India to impart employability and entrepreneurship skills to the youth by merging various schemes from across ministries. India has the world’s youngest workforce with over 12 million new entrants in the labour market every year but it is short on skills as only 2.5per cent of the employees have any certified ability.
As a result, the country’s demographic dividend has not materialised. The industry is unable to find employable workers, a situation that experts say could lead to socio-economic unrest if the youth remain unemployed and have no avenue for training.
The target is to skill 500 million people by 2022 and the government is largely betting on private players for skill development programmes.
Recently, the ministry of labour and employment has signed flexi MOUs (memorandums of understanding) with Tata Sons, Flipkart, Raymonds and the Gujarat Industrial Power Company Ltd (GIPCL) that will give companies the flexibility to design training programmes at Industrial Training Institutes in a manner that the youth are skilled according to the specific needs of the industry.
