Union Budget 2021: India needs to review youth employability, says Neeti Sharma

By Neeti Sharma

With 90 million youth entering the workforce by 2030, and with 60 million employment opportunities expected to be created due to the digital economy by 2025, India needs to take a re-look at the employability of the youth. Skills are becoming ever more important and 50% of our workforce is still not adequately skilled.

For the Indian economy to get out of the post-pandemic slumber, the need of the hour is to mobilize jobs and improve skills of the youth. Union Budget 2021 needs to focus on developing a robust digital infrastructure.

Furthermore, with a large part of the Skills Development budget for FY21 being unutilised or underutilised, in this budget, the government needs to create structured avenues for utilizing the funds such that skills development for the youth of our country becomes a continuous activity rather than get stalled due to certain conditions.

Some of the key areas which will require attention are augmenting physical infrastructure, enabling technology adoption for blended learning/skilling, fast-tracking policy implementation and streamlining the skilling ecosystem.

One of the other key aspects that the budget should look at is introducing tax relief on the CSR funds. Exempting GST and other tax liabilities on the CSR funds will reduce the cost burden and enable more corporates to effectively use CSR budgets for initiatives such as skill training and rural workforce development.

(The author is Senior Vice President, TeamLease Services)