In a country where manual labour is stigmatised to the extent that it is the basis for social discrimination of the occupation-linked castes, the shudras, the task before Minister of Skill Development Rajiv Pratap Rudy is not just training and professionalising the workforce. It also entails the more complex job of restoring dignity to labour, the absence of which is among the biggest impediments to socioeconomic progress. In an interview to BusinessLine, Rudy talked about making manual work “aspirational”, the various ways of integrating carpenters and electricians to the industry and creating Uber and Ola-like platforms for masons and painters. Excerpts:
Job creation is the single biggest failure of this government. As opposed to the promise of 1 crore jobs a year, you have managed to provide barely 1.55 lakh jobs, significantly lower than the 10 lakh created by the Manmohan Singh government in 2009. How do you answer this, especially being engaged in training India’s workforce, the ultimate aim of which is to get them jobs?
Let me clarify at the outset that my job is not to create employment but to generate skills and employability. Having said that, let us look at the issue in its entirety. We have been talking to the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation as also to the NSSO (National Sample Survey Organisation), which puts the figure of India’s skilled workforce at 2.5 per cent. That is not true. What it means is that a lot of our workforce is simply not getting captured. In Delhi, for instance, you need 10,000 gardeners. Now, I consider them skilled workers because they know the seasons, which plants grow when, how much watering and nutrients are to be given. Aren’t they part of the workforce? If Ola and Uber have asked for three lakh drivers, we train them on how to use GPS, how to use the point of sale and link them to that platform. Who is an Ola driver? Is he an entrepreneur, a worker?”
What is not being understood is the vision of the Prime Minister, which is unfolding in ways that will take a while to be visible. It is human resource development at its most professional level. I’ll give an example of a young girl in Devas, Madhya Pradesh. She did a course under the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojna (PMKVY). We attached her, as we attach thousands of others, to bank financing through MUDRA. She went back to her village with some capital spent on buying her equipment and set up her little Radhika Beauty Parlour. Her average income, sitting at home, is ₹15,000 a month and during marriages and festive season, she earns over ₹40,000 a month. Isn’t that employment? Isn’t that empowerment?
Self-employment was not created by your government. It is what people have done for themselves in the absence of the State having a long-term vision about the shrinking capacity of agriculture to provide jobs, mass-scale urbanisation and the absence of developing alternatives like China has done with manufacturing. What is your contribution to it?
Self-employment existed in the traditional sphere in the sense that plumbers, electricians, carpenters and masons were all part of a cultural ecosystem which had no branding and absolutely no aspirational value. A youngster in a globalised world who is exposed to modernity through the proliferation of mass media wants a white collar job. He would rather be a clerk than a carpenter. What we have done is to make an exhaustive effort towards formalising these traditional ecosystems. We are creating systems to mobilise this vast workforce to be formally trained, get degrees, become absorbed in industrial training. It was a challenge for us to define a National Skills Qualification Framework (NSQF) under the PMKVY.
Under this, we are training one crore people and sector skill councils have been created to include as many as 40 industries such as hospitality, automotives, health, textiles, construction etc. I urge you to visit some of the PMKVY centres and see for yourself the augmentation and upgradation we have done in terms of the training procedures and modules. Then no training is complete without the worker actually performing on the factory floor. The industry creates and validates the stature and requirement of this manpower. We train them and, under the National Apprenticeship Programme, we have about 2.5 lakh apprentices in different industries. This is not comparable in scale with China, for instance, where the number is supposed to be about one crore, or in Japan, where it is about 40 lakh. But my target is to get the industry to absorb these people on the shop floor. The government is giving money to the industry to provide one year in-house training to these youngsters. The spectrum has become so big that every ministry now has the Ministry of Skill Development as its partner in this venture.
To make manual labour “aspirational” and a tool towards social mobility is the real challenge, isn’t it? India is still a country where only the intellectual work carries a premium and is reflective of a person’s social stature. To provide stature and respectability as also to monetise manual work substantially is the real task?
Absolutely. I don’t have a ready remedy for the socio-psychological barriers that prevent manual job from becoming respectable and rewarding. But all this exhaustive work is certainly towards formalising and professionalising our workforce so that we have a standing in the world. Even if we are able to teach German and French to our plumbers, we can attach a certain premium to their work. What sort of profile do you conjure up when you think of a welder — of a person wielding a torch by the roadside? But think of a young woman in a uniform, working in an air-conditioned environment in the Tata Motors assembly line. She has a different profile and higher pay grade. And, of course, she has social dignity. Then there is another grade of welder who works with a different kind of torch, dons a different gear and works on the Hazira-Vijaipur pipeline. His qualification, his salary, his profile are entirely different. Then we move up and envisage a welder who goes deep-sea diving and welds the bottom of a ship or works in an oil rig. He has higher qualifications, salary and work profile and therefore social dignity. By creating NSQF alignments in it, we have been able to not just professionalise a traditional work force but have created social mobility.
There is also talk of linking central educational boards with ITIs to provide degrees and further strengthen this ecosystem...
We are very excited about it. To further boost vocational education, we are aligning the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE) with ITI students which currently number about 2.3 million. This is designed to facilitate mobility between the vocational and formal education systems which will help students undertaking courses in ITIs to pursue regular courses in other schools and colleges.
No comments:
Post a Comment