India to set up 1,500 more ITIs

With a view to harness skill potential across the country 1,500 more Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and 50,000 Skills Development Centres will be set up under the proposed ‘Skills Development Mission’of the Government of India.

Addressing the Skills World 2008’ summit organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Aspire, Ministry of Labour and Employment’s Employment and Training Director General Sharda Prasad added that the Ministry has embarked on setting up Sectoral Councils as part of the government’s Skills Development Policy.

The government wants to play the role of a facilitator in this field, Prasad said, inviting the industry to join hands with it to create a road map for solving this problem.

He said that skills development and unemployment is a core concern not just in India but worldwide and Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) are the key to realising India’s vast potential in this area and achieving socially equitable and inclusive growth.

“From a global perspective India is doing better than it thinks its doing in the field of HR, but it needs to build on it for HR today is problem of scale,” Wharton HR Director Peter Cappelli said while speaking at the summit.

He further added that while education providers need to gear up to provide the needed skillsets, the employers need to invest more in training and right hiring.

Fortis Healthcare CEO and MD Shivinder Mohan Singh said that India is on a scorching economic rise for the past few years and the only bottleneck can be not having enough people to do what India needs to do.

Stressing that India’s young population is its demographic dividend and should not allow it to become a demographic divide, Singh said that skills development is a concern not just of industry and GDP but of society, governance and growth.

“Only 39.5 per cent of graduates in India are employable and the challenge is to bridge the HR gap by providing skills training to the other 60 per cent,” Aspire Founder and CEO Amit Bhatia said while launching its India Skills Report Card 2008 at the summit.

The Aspire CEO suggested that India needs to apply supply chain principles to achieve the talent of demand targets and achieve a more equitable social and economic model, besides setting up of Special Education Zones to meet the growing demand.

Meanwhile, the government has given its approval for setting up of coordinated mechanisms encompassing different public and private initiatives with the statement of Vision, Mandate and scope of activities.

The coordinated action would aim at creating a pool of skilled personnel in appropriate numbers with adequate skills in line with the employment requirements across the entire economy.