Skilling and Growth Nexus - Measurement, Policy and challenges in the context of India

Abstract

“If we have to promote the development of our country then our mission has to be skill development and skilled India”
… Prime Minister Narendra Modi
Skill is the capability to do something nicely, create something new and innovations leading from existing talent,
training, or practice. It is also the ability to provide solutions to the different kind of problems and situations.
Developments of these skills are very important for the economic prosperity of the country. Skilling is considered to
be one of the most important factor as it certainly leads to economic growth by building capability and making
economy self-sustainable. Skill and the right set of knowledge are also regarded as the key factors for the growth and
social upliftment of any country. It is noticed that the countries having skilled labor force find it easier to adjust in the
competitiveness nature of world of work. Skilled labors are not prone to changing work environment of world.
India is on the verge of becoming a knowledge economy. It is therefore indispensable to identify the right set of skills
required to be imparted to labor force and lead them towards capability development.To accomplish the very objective
of the economic growth, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of India has to grow at a rapid pace of 8% to 9%
consistently. This will require some major changes and significant improvement in infrastructure sector, agricultural
sector, manufacturing sector and also need skilled labor force to fasten the process of goods and services delivery.
Major challenge India withholds is not only to impart skill leading to economic prosperity but to soak in the excess
supply of labor coming from rural sector. India is a labor intensive country and there is labor availability in abundance.
With the limited training infrastructure, it is indeed a challenging task to train this vast number of laborers in India and
turn them into productive skilled workforce. Even the lack of awareness among labor force to go through training
program is other issue. As per the National Skill Development Mission (NSDM) Document, there is a shortage of the
trained laborers in India. Only 2.3 percent of the workers in India went through formal training. If we look at the
statistics of labor force attending training for some other country, it was like sixty-seven percent in United Kingdom,
seventy-five percent in Germany, eighty percent in Japan and so on. All these countries are already a developed nation.
This fact reveals an interesting finding that the pool of Indian workforce mostly lacked requisite skills and was mostly
unemployable.High percentage of labor receiving training makes them skilled and capable. It also shows a pattern of a
linear correlation among developed nation workforce and skill.