India needs to provide skill training to109 million new entrants : Punjab CM

After chairing a meeting of NITI Aayog sub-group of chief ministers on skill development, Punjab’s chief minister Parkash Singh Badal highlighted that by 2020 India has to provide skill training to 109 million new entrants into the job markets and 460 million people to upscale their skills.

He said, "Now the time has come that right to skill be legalized since we have already empowered our citizens with the right to information (RTI), right to food and right to education." Badal said.

Though India today is a youngest country as 65 percent of the population is below the age of 35, still our country faces a serious problem of unemployment especially amongst the youths, ladies and low strata of the society, admits NITI Aayog official.

When we compare India with countries like Korea, Japan and Germany whose population is 80 per cent skilled our country’s skilled population stand only about 12 per cent, said Minister. He further expressed that the per capita income of our country is low because our nation is unskilled nation, our country is far behind other countries in skill development. He also put emphasis on the need to mobilized targeted population particularly the rural youths, the weaker section and women to make them aware of skill training and motivate them to take advantage to take skill training programme.

While adding that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has constituted this board of chief ministers to go in details about how to go and make this nation a skilled nation, he said, "We have to do lots of home work to convince them that skill is more important than even service in government jobs."

Badal has set 25 June as the deadline for the state governments to submit their views and suggestion. Sindhushree Khullar, CEO, NITI Aayog also expressed the need to speed up the recommendation process and expressed concern that only few states have responded in writing on the same.

The chief ministers are expected to recommend measures to NITI Aayog on how to deal with shortage of skilled manpower in production lines and also to propose measures to expand outreach of skill programmes particularly in demographically advantageous states.