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We have an employability problem by Milind Deora
Three ostensibly disparate recent events have left me pondering about a lurking common thread among them: the Egypt uprising, PM’s appointment of a Cabinet-rank advisor for skills development and the fifth anniversary of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). What could be common among unrest in the Arab world, a seemingly inconspicuous government appointment and a fifth anniversary of a social welfare programme? The answer is youth, employment and employability. Let me explain. First, the unrest in Egypt.

As I watched hundreds of thousands of people protesting against incumbency and demanding change, the inescapable observation was that a large percentage of these protestors are youth. More than the outcome of the rebellion, I was intrigued by the causes that led to the Tahrir Square demonstration and it is evident that changing demographics of Egypt with its large youth population played a crucial role in the timing of this unrest. On February 1, the Prime Minister appointed S Ramadorai , former chief of Tata Consultancy Services , as his advisor on skills development. As our country continues to expand its share of youth population with an expected average age of 29 years by the year 2020, it becomes imperative that we create a fertile environment with productive jobs for the youth. In this context, the Prime Minister’s appointment of a person of the calibre of Ramadorai to focus on skills development is heartening.

The unilateral success of MGNREGS lies in the fact that it has provided the much-needed cushion to withstand wagerelated shocks to the poor majority of our country. With the MGNREGS providing the basic protection, the next challenge that beckons us is to provide industry-employable skills to these large MGNREGS beneficiaries that will boost their income levels. As the Chinese saying goes, “to give a man a fish is to feed him for a day, to teach him how to fish is to feed him for life” . The impetus provided by our 7%+ GDP growth over the past few years in job creation is commendable. However, I am reminded constantly by corporate India that we do not have an unemployment problem but an unemployability problem , i.e., a lot of our workforce is unemployable in industry due to lack of skills. And I witness this first-hand almost on a daily basis in my constituency — the rising number of both jobs and people looking for jobs. This gap between the demand for skilled labour and the available supply is already large and rising further.

This gap needs to be bridged hastily. Based on my experience in running youth employability initiatives in my South Mumbai constituency, I see three main issues that need to be addressed for us to bridge this skills gap in the country: training capacity, funding for training and urban migration. If we have to provide employable skills in such large numbers and within a timeframe before the population ages, it is evident that there needs to be a manifold increase in training capacity, much beyond the nearly 2,000 industrial training institutes (ITIs) and the nearly 5,000 industrial training centers across the country. This increase in capacity can be contributed by both the private sector as well as the government. The biggest bottleneck seems to be one of funding. Most highquality training programmes require students to be in class fulltime for two-three months and this becomes unaffordable for the vast majority of the poor both in terms of opportunity costs of time as well as the fees required by the private sector training institutes. Here, the solution could be for the government to act as financiers for the needy and provide training vouchers or its equivalent that can be encashed at any of the training institutes.

The third issue is one of urban migration since a significant percentage of the jobs generated still tend to be in urban , tier-1 and 2 towns. If the government and the private sector come together to solve the first two issues and create large pools of skilled and trained workers, I implore the private sector to go to non-urban towns to set up businesses and provide local jobs, thereby easing the pressures of urban migration. The finance minister, in his Budget speech of 2008-09 , had announced the formation of the National Skills Development Corporation as a unique public-private partnership model with a mandate to provide skills training to 50 crore people by the year 2022. Now, with the appointment of a person from the corporate world to oversee skills development, there is great hope and enthusiasm in achieving this target. I certainly do not allude to a risk of an Egypt-style uprising in our country, given the inherent strengths of our democracy and strong institutions that foster participative democracy at multiple levels. And I share the hopes of the millions of this country that we will overcome this daunting unemployability challenge and provide productive jobs to hundreds of millions of youth in the years to come.

(The author is a member of Parliament. The article is written with inputs from Praveen Chakravarty of Unique Identity Authority of India)