An initiative to provide better skill development courses

Even when I talk of experience I am not just talking of numbers, I am saying the experience has been so good in the form or in the manner that industries have participated with us to provide the training material and the content.

Below is the transcript of the interview

Q: On skill development initiative...

Goyal: Our Prime Minister takes decisions and implements them on a fast-tracked basis. I used to feel sad, in fact on many programmes including yours, probably I have talked in the past about how the past government would give Rs 1000 crore for skilling and at the end of the year revert that back saying it is not required. It happened for two years in a row.

A very distinguished person such as Ramadorai gave his time, took the initiative to become the chief of the National Skill Development Corporation, it took them two years to get a place for him to sit in. I remember meeting him in his office in Mumbai because he had no place to work out of Delhi. This government has in the first instance removed the skill component of different ministries and centred it around a separate ministry and given a very seasoned leader Rajiv Pratap Rudy. He is a very seasoned and experienced minister who has been given this important task to reflect our concern and our seriousness in this ministry.

Secondly, the fact that this time around we are planning it to scale not necessarily through government intervention alone. A government can plan to include a million people but the country needs far more and expectations, aspirations are far deeper. So, we are planning to engage more with the private sector, take it up as a role of a facilitator. In fact I was just discussing with Chanda Kochhar before we came up if we could partner with ICICI Bank’s initiative and I can see for myself that the power sector alone is going to need a million people for my renewable energy initiative, for the transmission and distribution initiative that we are taking. I was telling her let's look at scale, how can we get large numbers of professionals trained in the energy sector.

Q: Have you taken the minister up on his offer? Are you going to be supplying him the kind of people that he needs and skilling them for him as well?

Kochhar: That is what we have been doing. We set up this initiative just about a year ago or less than that. In less than 10 months or so we have set up nine centres all over India. We believe we are setting up so many centres because it is important to go closer to where the people are rather than expecting them to come at the central level.

Skills that we talked about here as you saw are very basic. People who want to become repair people for air conditioners, electrical work, even basic selling skills, office administration skills. By the time this financial year ends we are actually going to be training about 10000 people. In that sense for the first year it is a good number. However, as Piyush Goyal said, this is just the beginning. The requirement for the country is so huge and our experience has been so good that it gives us the confidence to kind of scale it up even more.

Even when I talk of experience I am not just talking of numbers, I am saying the experience has been so good in the form or in the manner that industries have participated with us to provide the training material and the content.

SMEs and a lot of other service and manufacturing industries are actually tying up with us to pick up those people. Youth is excited. Out of the 10000 people more than 30 percent are young girls and all of them have found placements.