New Delhi, September 05, 2015: Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) in partnership with the World Bank organized a Google+ Hangout with participants from some of India’s largest companies to enable greater engagement in the skills space.
It marked one of the first direct engagements between the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) and the corporate sector. The panelists consisted of Shri Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Minister of State (I/C) SDE, Shri Rohit Nandan, Secretary (SDE), Shri S. Ramadorai, Chairman – NSDA & NSDC, and Mr. Onno Ruhl, Country Director – World Bank, in addition to the heads of large Indian corporate houses like SBI, BHEL, Amazon, ICICI Bank, Mahindra, ONGC, TCS and Lemon Tree Hotels. The discussion was moderated by Shereen Bhan from CNBC TV18.
The Google+ Hangout, saw the government and corporates discuss innovative models for skill development which have been successful in small pockets and could be scaled up to benefit the community. The topic of how Corporate Social Responsibility funds of Indian companies can be channeled towards skill development initiatives of the government, was also on the agenda for the discussion.
The Minister highlighted that there were silos in the skill development landscape which need to be tackled by removing disconnect between individual skill development efforts initiated by various entities and setting national standards of skilling and certification. The integration process started by the government would help scale skill development efforts across the country. Citing international examples, the Minister exalted industry and corporates to play a proactive role in the skill training ecosystem of the country.
ICICI mentioned that their experience of imparting skill training to 25,000 people through 21 skill development institutes with knowledge partners as well as governments of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh had been very positive. 300 employers have already signed MoUs to place persons trained through these centres and ICICI targets to train 1 lakh people in the coming years. SBI also has around 117 rural training centres where 2,65,000 persons have been trained across 247 vocations. However, challenges of productivity and placements, which can be tackled through focused skill gap analyses, were highlighted by Ms. Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairman-SBI. Ameet Nivsarkar from TCS mentioned that their BPO employability programmes and IT employability programmes, having trained over 74,000 persons, still face issues of unqualified instructors and outdated curriculum.
Amit Agarwal, Country Director of Amazon India also brought forth that they could collaborate with the government by sharing their certification programmes and training delivery methodologies. Rajeev Dubey, Chairman & CEO, Mahindra Rise reiterated that their experience of adopting ITIs has been very successful as evidenced by the 100% placement rate achieved. He indicated that their efforts are being directed at adopting more ITIs and linking the trainees to jobs at the end of the training period.
“There is a need to create credible training and certification procedures which would be valuable to employers as it is essential to ultimately link skills to jobs. Being the human resource capital of the world implies that the aspirations of each Indian need to be addressed. This can only be done by ensuring equal opportunity for skilling to reach even the most disadvantaged segments of society”, said Onno Ruhl, World Bank Country Director in India
Secretary, SDE mentioned that efforts were being made by the Ministry in collaboration with World Bank, to create a platform for sharing of funds and knowledge resources between the corporate and government towards skill development. It was also reiterated that partnerships between the government and industry is essential, since the scale of skilling required cannot be achieved through individual efforts.
YouTube link for viewing the Hangout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPTzhHhy7Og
