Govt. To Launch Skills Portal To Rescue Make-in-India

Trade & Policy

Govt. To Launch Skills Portal To Rescue Make-in-India

The Union government is planning to put up a national skills portal which will assess in real time the demand-supply gap existing in the current pool of workforce and help the policy makers and the implementing agencies to come up with a time bound action plan to expedite the whole process of the skill development programme. The portal being developed by the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC) and the World Bank will be launched sometime in July this year.

The move follows the Skill India Programme failing to meet its Skill India target to train 400 million of unskilled people by 2022. The flagship scheme is running far behind its target with hardly 40 million trained in four years by different stakeholders since then. Around 10 million entrants are trained every year by the skill development ministry (6 million) and other central ministries like agriculture, textile and IT (4 million). The cabinet secretary has directed the ministry of skill development and entrepreneurship to converge all skilling data across sectors, gender, social and geographic landscape to assess demand and supply for the skilled workforce.

Around 12 million youth enter the country’s workforce every year but a large chunk of them are unemployable because of poor skill sets, which is why it’s a key thrust area for the government. Skilling the new entrants while upskilling and reskilling the existing workforce will mean there will be more employable people available for the industry. Currently, on one hand, the major industries including textiles are faced with the challenges of finding people with right kind of skill sets, even as overall employment number have not been able to make much of progress. In other words, there is a very limited supply of employable manpower pool with right skill sets and if the scenario is not reversed quickly, the whole of manufacturing sector may soon go into big problem.

Experts feel that manpower availability is one of the factors that have adversely impacted the progress of PM’s Make in India programme. Moreover, they are also of the view that the manufacturing sector is looking to embrace new facets like digitalization and IoT and hence there is need for manpower which can fit into this requirement. “The digitalisation of production processes in the textile industry is in need of a whole new set of skills and training solutions for current trend of automation. Partnerships between technology suppliers and textile manufacturers have become an essential component in providing solutions to the needs of fast-fashion and increasingly more significant ecommerce retail channels,” says an expert.

The domestic textile industry has continued to lag behind in implementing various programmes and one of the reasons cited is the fragmented nature of the industry where still over 70 per cent of the production comes from the MSME segment. Most of these smaller units due to lack of adequate resources and knowhow have shown inertia in making right transition and thus have failed to undergo the much needed upgradation to meet the external challenges.

Globalization and trade liberalization have ushered in new opportunities as well as challenges for MSMEs. At present, only a small part of the MSME sector is able to identify and exploit these opportunities and deal with the challenges. The majority of MSMEs have been less able or unable to exploit the benefits of globalization and are frequently under pressure on the local or domestic markets from cheaper imports and foreign competition. The potential of MSMEs is often not realized because of problems commonly related to size, isolation, market opportunities, standards/quality, supply chains, logistics and technology innovation. To preserve their narrow profit margins, these small-scale entrepreneurs do not opt to innovate products and processes and resort to tactics that deters their growth in the long run.