'Skill training has become a numbers game'

The crisis of youth unemployment – especially educated unemployment – has become a major area of policy concern, one that has been reframed as that of ‘skills deficit’. While employers often complain about the ‘unemployability’ of potential hires, countless educated youth are unable to find jobs that meet their expectations. The Skill India Mission was set up to address this crisis by harnessing India’s ‘demographic dividend’ and channelling the desires and energies of youth through skill training for productive employment. However, skill training policies and programmes are riddled with gaps and contradictions.

The National Skill Policy introduced in 2009 marked a significant shift away from
vocational training through government institutes, towards the privatisation and outsourcing of skill development. Today, skill training is imparted through a plethora of private organisations (both for-profit companies and NGOs) which draw on government and corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds for their activities.

Skilling programmes are managed and funded by a range of agencies and parastatal organisations such as the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) and a
series of Sector Skill Councils (SSCs).

The Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), the flagship scheme of the Ministry, serves mainly as a funding agency implemented through the NSDC.

The multiplication of initiatives and actors has created a complicated skilling ‘ecosystem’ imparting variety training, both in terms of content and quality. In 2016, a government-appointed committee found that the uptake of skill training as well as post-training job placement have been inadequate.

The report was critical of the promotion of short-term skilling and certification programmes in place of longer-term vocational diploma courses, suggesting that the new approach may not deliver marketable skills.

The current skill development framework has also been criticised for its target-driven orientation and its focus on short-term ‘top-up’ courses for youth with secondary or higher educational qualifications. Moreover, skill centres are tasked with the responsibility of finding jobs for ‘trained’ youth and so tend to channel trainees into contractual low-paying jobs to fulfil their targets.

These issues were explored in a field-based study of skilling and service sector employment conducted by the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC) and the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, during 2017-19.

The study found that skill training organisations in Bengaluru are highly motivated by the goal of alleviating poverty through training and job placement – especially by targeting youth from disadvantaged, rural backgrounds with at least a Class X education.

On their part, semi-educated rural youth are inspired motivated to join skill training courses – which are often free or subsidised – mainly by the prospect of learning English and computer skills as well as by guaranteed job placement.

Skill centres in Bengaluru have identified the organised service sector as the main source of employment for such youth. Trainees are channelled into high-volume, high-turnover jobs such as retail sales, transportation & logistics, back-office customer support and beauty & wellness, mainly in Bengaluru. Thus, skill development programmes encourage the migration of rural youth to the cities and also cater to the growing demand for labour in the lower rungs of the burgeoning urban service economy.

Indeed, service sector companies actively seek employees from smaller cities, towns and villages because they are thought to be more pliant and ‘loyal’. Skill training centres appear to play a major role in facilitating this continuous flow of workers. The stratum of youth that our study documented – most with Class X or XII education but lacking good professional or college degrees, and with limited English language skills – are well suited to the requirements of industries such as retail and back office customer support services (vernacular language), which experience high rates of employee turnover and so are always in ‘hire mode’.

These jobs are typically characterised by low salaries, insecurity of employment, high onerous working conditions, lack of a clear career path, and hence levels of employee turnover. We found that many trainees had returned to their villages or home towns within a few months of joining work, with little to show for their training and work experience in Bengaluru.

They were unable to sustain themselves in the city on the salaries they were earning, given the high costs of accommodation and other living expenses - especially since they needed to save enough to help support their families back home.

Although skill centres are well aware that trainees (especially migrants) need substantial hand-holding during their transition into corporate jobs, they are unable to provide adequate follow-up services after placement – exacerbating the high attrition rates. These problems stem from the Skill India policy framework itself, which has turned skill training into a numbers game.

Training centres need to produce a certain number of graduates and placements to meet their targets to access funding, but they lack the capacity or motivation to provide extended support to ensure that these vulnerable trainees find a stable foothold in the urban service economy.

Another reason for the instability and constant mobility we observed is that many
students joined skill training courses in pursuit of their own aspirations – to learn English or computers to help them get into government or ‘office’ jobs. The service jobs in which they were placed did not meet their expectations, nor could they imagine a long-term future in such jobs.

Thus, many respondents expressed a desire to return to their hometowns or villages rather than trying to sustain themselves in Bengaluru, where they have to constantly move from job to job in search of better pay or working conditions.

The skill training programmes we studied thus contribute to the creation of an army of footloose urban service workers, catering to the requirements of service industries for a ‘flexible’, non-permanent but constantly replenishable workforce. The mobilisation of rural youth by training centres to fill jobs that are essentially unregulated, low-paying and insecure raises troubling questions about current skill development policies and programmes.

Carol Upadhya is a Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru

You can read the full report by Carol Upadhay and Supriya RoyChowdhury here: https://www.nias.res.in/sites/default/files/2020-ISEC-NIAS-ICSSR-Project-Report.pdf