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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | How to 'Skill India' When the Jobs are Bad -Orlanda Ruthven

How to 'Skill India' When the Jobs are Bad -Orlanda Ruthven

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published Published on Sep 12, 2017   modified Modified on Sep 12, 2017
-TheWire.in

There a growing chasm between corporate India’s hiring strategy and the aspirations of India’s young workers.

The new skill development minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, has a strong track record in digital schemes to deliver subsidised gas to needy households. But he is in for a challenge in the vocational training sector, less amenable to scale economies, woefully dependent on private industry and saddled with the burden of expectations set, first by the outlandish targets declared by the UPA in 2010 (of 40 crore workers by 2022) and then by the marketing hype of the NDA’s Skill India.

In 2015, over 30% of India’s youth was neither employed nor in education nor training, one of the highest percentages in the world. The just-released Niti Aayog report declares that jobs are not being created fast enough, but also that the jobs available are of poor quality. The solution: the oft-heard mantra of more, and quicker, labour reforms. But Niti Aayog’s outgoing chairman has himself admitted that this conventional explanation is lacking, and that the real cause relates more to the aversion of a growing cohort of Indian industry to get bogged down in labour-intensive processes.

In 2014, I was charged with finding jobs for Skill India-trained entrants from Eastern India in Delhi-NCR’s auto-components and electronics industries. The assignment allowed me a vantage point on the skills gap – that between the supply of provincial youth armed with skills certificates, and the demand for workforce from production plants serving Indian and global markets. What do such jobs look like for new entrants? And is the government skills policy helping to deliver jobs, and better jobs?

Today’s workforce managers in global industrial plants face a number of challenges. They need workers – sometimes in large numbers (as many as 100-200 at a time) – but they can only sustain these jobs when work is available. What’s more, most jobs are not only poorly paid but uninteresting – requiring, for example, a micro-routine of gestures to be endlessly repeated on an assembly line, the monitoring of one or two machines or a fixed routine of quality checks. Such jobs offer scant opportunity to learn and progress.

How do companies succeed in cranking into place a workforce which fits these unpromising conditions, where workers are increasingly aware and have growing aspirations? By following a few basic rules, none of which augur well for Pradhan or Modi.

Rule Number 1: Avoid regularising workers, while never completely dousing their hope

In spite of the clear limits framed in labour law, it is now relatively easy for firms to hire short-term en masse. Some do this by using labour agencies – contractors – for functions across the shop floor. 4P Logistics is one such contractor, feeding several thousand workers into Japanese and other global automotive and electronics companies in Bawal’s industrial area off the highway to Jaipur, where joining formalities include signing a letter of resignation and four blank forms (a criminal offence in India). Upshot Nissan, another such agency, provides more than 20,000 workers to 140 companies in the automotive components sector of Sriperumbadur, outside Chennai. One of its largest clients is the Renault-Nissan plant to which Upshot supplies more than 2,800 workers.

Contractors like Upshot and 4P do not procure workers; they simply assist in their just-in-time allocation. With no ties linking contractor and worker, such third parties are poorly placed to address attrition, which climbs to above 30% monthly. But crucially, they act as aggregators – helping in the efficient allocation of manpower and keeping wages down. The fees paid to contractors, one manager explained to me, buys peace of mind that the assembly line will be filled each day, regardless of with whom.

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TheWire.in, 11 September, 2017, https://thewire.in/175882/skill-india-narendra-modi-jobs-in-india-unemployment/


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