Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship planning to release ‘New definition of skills in line with international standards’

New Delhi : The skill development and entrepreneurship ministry is readying to release a definition of skills in line with international standards, two years after it launched the Skill India Mission.

The new definition will clearly outline what constitutes skills and the ministry hopes to see a substantial increase in the number of skilled personnel based on the new definition when the statistics and programme implementation ministry comes out with the next National Sample Survey Office survey on vocational training in 2020.

“We plan to come up with a clear definition of skills that is aligned with international standards and fulfils the purpose of getting data to give us the actual number of skilled personnel in the country,” said, K P Krishnan, skill development and entrepreneurship secretary.

Only people trained for vocational education from Industrial Training Institutes under the erstwhile Skills Development Initiative are accounted for under the existing rules for measuring skills in the country. “As per the last survey, the numbers for vocational training are dismally low when compared to other countries. A lot of initiatives are being taken to impart quality skills training under this government and the idea of defining skills is to widen the base and capture the real picture,” Krishnan said.

The NSSO survey on vocational training is done every five years and the next survey is due in 2020. “Many rounds of discussions have taken place between the ministries of skill development and entrepreneurship, and statistics and programme implementation,” said a senior official in the statistics and programme implementation ministry. “User ministries put in their recommendations and an expert group takes a call on those. Then we see how possible it is to do data collection. However, they need to give us a definition of skills first.”

The latest NSSO survey on vocational training, conducted in 2015, shows just 2.2% of those aged between 15 and 59 years received formal vocational training while 8.6% in the same age group received non-formal vocational training.

This is barely a tenth of the numbers in European countries every year. The report is based on the employment and unemployment survey conducted between July 2011and June 2012 covering 4,56,999 people.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had in 2015 launched the Skill India Mission, which has an ambitious target of imparting skills to about 40.2 crore workers by 2022. However, skill development minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy confirmed that his ministry has abandoned targets and said the focus is now on quality training.

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