Getting a dependable driver who picks your call at midnight and a domestic help who doesn’t skip her duty when its raining cats and dogs aren’t that easy. However, the Centre’s National Career Service (NCS) unveiled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week aims to turn the employment of such workers - domestic help, caretakers, plumbers, electricians - into less of a gamble on both sides. Also it could evolve into one of the world's biggest employment portals if the government is able to put the ambitious thinking behind the plan into effect, as per a news report in The Economic Times.
Hiring in the unorganised sector currently takes place by word of mouth or through placement agencies that charge heavily and aren't always dependable. As part of efforts to regularise the process and make it more reliable, the government is encouraging individual households, entrepreneurs and small businesses to register themselves on the NCS portal to seek out people with the required skills. NCS services are free while details of both the employer as well as the job seeker will be Aadhaar-based and hence authenticated.
The government is also eyeing exclusive tie-ups with big corporate houses and ministries to hire professionals through the portal. "Our biggest challenge is to gemployers. Hence, we will soon kick-start the exercise to rope in private players as well as government ministries and departments to post all their job vacancies on the portal for the benefit of large numbers of job seekers," a senior government official told ET.
"Besides, we are contemplating to tie up with existing job portals like Naukri.com or Monster.com as well as private agencies to work through this portal," a person told the financial daily on condition of anonymity. The NCS portal already has a database of more than 2 crore job seekers and over 9 lakh establishments looking for candidates. A labour ministry estimate suggests that there are over 1 crore unemployed youth in the country while another 4 crore are under employed. With information on 11,000 Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and more than 12,000 vocational training programmes, the portal and counselors associated it will help candidates get guidance on the right career options for them.
"The next step forward in order to make the portal more vibrant would be entering into MoUs (memoranda of understanding) with existing job portals to reach out to their database of employers," an official told the ET.
"However, we will have to work out the business model as all these portals are subscription based while our mandate under the ILO (International Labour Organisation) convention is to provide free employment services." The Indian Staffing Federation, the only private placement agency to have partnered with the government on the portal thus far, feels credibility is the biggest draw. "Government is the largest organisation in country and a job portal from it offers trust and credibility to primary job seekers who are otherwise sceptical of posting their profile on private portals, fearing that they would be cheated," ISF executive director Suchita Dutta told the financial daily.