Women, youth to be focus of skill-development programme

Ruchika M Khanna

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, May 27

Women and youth will be the focused targets for skill development across the country. Skill development will not just be restricted to empowering youth for jobs in the corporate sector, but also in agriculture and allied activities and in traditional crafts of each state.

These are some of the recommendations which will be part of the draft prepared by the Niti Aayog sub-group on skill development, being chaired by Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal.

The draft report, which is ready and was discussed at a high-level meeting chaired by Badal here today, will now be presented to all members of the sub-group in its meeting scheduled for June 7 at Raipur.

The CMs of Assam, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Odisha, Puducherry, Tripura and Tamil Nadu are members of this group.

Among the other recommendations of the group are establishing a Right to Skills for Youth Act that will make it mandatory for the states to impart skills to all youth and women. The draft also recommends that the corporate sector should be involved at each step in the skill development programme, so that the skills imparted are in consonance with the needs of the employers. The corporates will also be asked to fund these schemes.

It is learnt that an important recommendation of the committee is to converge the 17 different skill-development programmes being run by 20 different ministries in the Government of India and to find trainers for imparting skills to the targeted population, as a shortage of trainers is being felt.

The report mentions how India, being the youngest nation in the world with 65 per cent of the population below 35 years of age, is unable to make the most of its demographic dividend, because of lack of skill development of the young.

While most countries have more than 80 per cent skilled workforce, in India, the figure is just 12 per cent.