New skill-set for the unorganised

Smita Aggarwal

Posted online: Monday, September 08, 2008 at 2353 hrs Print Email

Mission mode Board to take up panel report today, before submission to PM

new delhi, september 7: Recognising the acute shortage of skilled workforce in the fast growing unorganized sector, a government panel has recommended that skill training in the unorganised sector should be taken up on a mission mode with the formation of a National Mission for Skill Development in the Unorganised Sector. To ensure its success, the government’s contribution towards skill development should be raised to Rs 40,000 crore in the next five years, it has said.

According to a report on ‘Skill Formation and Employment Assurance in the Unorganised Sector’ prepared by National Commission on Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS), chaired by Rajya Sabha MP Arjun Sengupta, the initial corpus of Rs 5,000 crore for the national mission should be allocated to the National Skill Development Board. The NCEUS advisory board will take up the report for discussion in its meeting on Monday, after which it will be submitted to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

For financing this initiative targeted at unorganized sector, the commission suggests “a levy on the turnover of companies to help partially meet the cost of skill development programmes”. The government may consider extending tax concessions for such corporate contributions. The proposed mission would focus on strengthening the institutional infrastructure, creation of labour market information systems and support demand-based skill development initiatives.

The commission, in its report, has panned the various skill development reports submitted by Planning Commission task force, Ministry of Labour and Employment and National Knowledge Commission. “From the commission’s point of view, a major lacuna of these reports is that they focus mainly on the needs of training for the organized sector workers and also do not assess the existing training systems for the unorganized sector workers,” says the NCEUS report. The commission is also critical of the role of newly formed National Skill Development Corporation, a public private partnership model for which government has allocated Rs 15,000 crore over a period of time, as the newly formed body will be performing some functions similar to those of National Council for Vocational Training.

The commission has estimated that the total labour force would reach 623 million by 2021-22, of which at least 50 per cent should have received formal training by 2021-22. This can be achieved by massive scaling up of skill development initiatives and increasing annual training capacity to 16 million by the beginning of Twelfth Plan (2012-2017). The training will be targeted at potential entrants to the workforce as well as those who require skill upgradation. Currently, as per NSSO estimates, only 2.6 per cent of the labour force has received any formal training.