Fixing India’s jobs problem: Why a holistic approach is imperative to bridge skills gap

A mushrooming of colleges run by politicians, with no focus on quality has caused an epidemic of unemployable graduates. A recent report seems to indicate that over 80 percent of the engineers, and 52 percent of all other graduates, produced by the education system can’t be hired. Speak to any hiring manager who have been interviewing candidates produced by the Indian educational system, and they will vouch for the difficulty in finding people who combine basic comprehension, cognition, and communication skills.

If you read policy reports from countries as diverse as China, the United Kingdom or South Korea – they have a clear vision on the jobs to be created for the future, and the gearing of the educational system today, to create the employees of tomorrow. It is this forward planning that gives them the edge. And, it is this lack of planning that loses us the advantage that was given to us by the first few governments of India, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, that envisioned an India of the future, and the institutes that would produce the trained professionals to handle that future.

At the very basic for the government of India, there needs to be a focus on the kind of jobs it needs to create in the near and distant future. And for that, there has to be a firm envisioning of the kind of India two decades from now and putting in place the education system that is required to create that India. For too long, this government’s focus has been history, and languages. And while both are fine in their place, they are not going to provide large numbers of people with large numbers of jobs. So, the main question that the government has to answer is what the jobs of tomorrow are, and how do we gear up to create those jobs, with people who are trained from now.

And, in tandem with this, there needs to be a focus on skilling, reskilling and training. India’s skills journey is way behind that of the countries we want to compete with. China, for example, is a manufacturing powerhouse, in part because of its vocational education and training (VET) that starts at the school level.  India’s Industrial Training Institute (ITIs), on the other hand, have been sorely neglected by the government, and funders. With the setting up of the National Council for Vocational Education and Training (NCVET), born out of the merger of the National Council for Vocational Training (NCVT) and the National Skill Development Agency (NSDA), it is hoped that this would change for the better.

For the government to address the unemployment crisis, it is important that it breaks down the walls of the silos that various departments have boxed themselves into, and empower them to work together to not just create the jobs, but also create the employees of tomorrow.

Read Harini Calamur's columns here.