PM internship portal for semi-skilled youth to be ready in 2 months
Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, August 10
The government is working to have the ambitious PM internship scheme up and running in two months, with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs conducting a two-day industry consultation ending on Friday.
The consultation, attended by PSUs on Thursday and top private players on Friday, saw Corporate Affairs Secretary Manoj Govil fielding queries and telling industry that they would need to design their own programmes to ensure employability of interns by the end of the year as the government will devise a mechanism to check intern employability by the end of the training year.
“You can get phone calls to ask what percentage of your interns are fit for gainful employment; there could also be surveys to assess the outcomes. Every industry would need to have a pre scheme and a post scheme plan,” he said.
Govil also informed the stakeholders that the scheme portal would be up in one and a half months and that was where the eligible interns would apply.
The scheme, he said, was applicable to two categories of youth — those who were not fully employed and those who were not engaged in full-time education. The interns were expected to attend training sessions onsite.
“We are looking at low and semi-skilled youth aged 21 to 24 years. Highly skilled youth who pass out of IITs, AIIMS, etc., will anyway get jobs and those are not our targets. Also, industry can absorb interns, not just in principal units but also in allied units, including vendors and partners,” he said, adding that the scheme modalities were being finalised.
The government has told industry that participation is voluntary and since one crore youth are to be skilled by India’s top 500 companies (by CSR spend over the past three years) in five years, around 4,000 interns, on an average, are to be hired per firm. But bigger firms would need to take the greater load, the officials clarified.
Each company would have to pay a monthly allowance of Rs 5,000 to every intern. The government also shared the annual cost-sharing model with industry today. Under this, the Centre will pay Rs 54,000 towards monthly allowance (plus Rs 6,000 grant for incidentals) to the company, which will pay the intern a monthly allowance of Rs 5,000 from CSR funds. Government sources said the training cost would have to be borne by the company from CSR funds.
