Despite the southern seaboard state of Tamil Nadu (pop.72.1 million), which is rapidly emerging as a manufacturing hub, experiencing an acute shortage — and rising wages — of skilled technicians in its automobile, construction and service sectors, there are not many takers for vocational education and training (VET) in the state. In spite of the fact that the state hosts 65 state government-run Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs), 627 private Industrial Training Centres (ITCs) and 447 polytechnics which between them have an annual intake capacity of 113,784 students.

To encourage youth from socio-economically disadvantaged households to pursue ITI diploma courses, the state government recently raised the financial aid for students signing up for VET programmes from a measly Rs.100-150 to Rs.500 per capita and deployed a sum of Rs.12.94 crore from its budget for the scheme. Earlier in 2009, the Union government in association with representatives of several industry organisations including CII, FICCI and Assocham promoted the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), a PPP (public-private partnership) organisation with an equity base of Rs.10 crore (49 percent government, 51 percent private) “to provide funding to build scalable, for-profit vocational training initiatives”.  However with few takers for VET, NSDC has been a non-starter, according to industry experts.

According to a recent study by the Confederation of Indian Industry — Tamil Nadu State Council (CII-TNSC), there is no provision for youth opting to enroll in ITIs and other vocational institutes to also receive formal school education simultaneously. Hence vocational courses seem unattractive and inferior. The policy lacuna is that the mainstream education system makes no provision for vocational training which would make students employable, and the vocational stream makes insignificant provision for learning mathematics and English language and communication skills.

The study also observed that in the next five years (2017), the demand for skilled personnel for industry in Tamil Nadu will rise to 6.8 million. By that time although 6.5 million will be in Tamil Nadu’s workforce, only 500,000-600,000 will have received formal VET. The rest will have to join the labour force without any skills, or join the swelling ranks of the 7.5 million registered unemployed in the state.

“The middle class mindset which segregates formal academic education from hands-on skills such as welding, carpentry, winding etc, has to change to make VET attractive to students and school drop-outs. Parents are strongly biased towards white collar jobs and don’t want children to take up shop floor vocations. At best they enroll them in one of the state’s 500 polytechnics which enables lateral entry into engineering college, or admit them in private professional institutions offering new tech-oriented courses in fashion design, computer programming and maintenance,” says S. Sangapalli, principal, Seshasayee Institute of Technology, a government aided polytechnic in Tiruchi.

Unfortunately even education ministry officials don’t seem excited about promoting VET, despite the severe shortage of skilled workers and technicians in industry. This is evidenced by the run down condition of 62 government ITIs with obsolete curriculums which are wholly out of sync with industry. “To meet the ever increasing demands of global customers for quality products, we need a new generation of well-educated and simultaneously skilled workers. For this we need a flexible education system which develops academic capabilities and strong technical skills. Since we don’t have such a system, we have started our own skill development centre to train class X school leavers and make them employable. The state government should support and incentivise such initiatives,” says M. Muthiah, senior vice-president of human resources at Carborundum Universal Ltd.

Quite obviously, there’s an emerging consensus of the need to shed step-brotherly attitudes towards skills development education and integrate VET into the formal education system in public and private schools, and also accord skills development diplomas the status of varsity degrees. With 6 million youth expected to enter the job market in Tamil Nadu in the next quinquennium, the challenge before government and industry in the state is to equip them with skills and knowledge that will enable Tamil Nadu to maintain its momentum of industrial and economic growth.

Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)