NSDC And The World Bank To Develop National Platform For Skilling Data

The Government of India is launching a data platform to aggregate skilling data from all central ministries, states and corporates. The National Skills Data platform is being developed by the National Skills Development Corporation(NSDC) and the World Bank.

The ministry of skill development and entrepreneurship looks to converge all skilling data across sectors, gender, social, and geographic landscape on this platform.

With this initiative, the Government aims to ascertain the rise in the number of skilled persons in the country under the Skill India Programme.

Skill India programme is a campaign launched by PM Narendra Modi in 2015 which aims to train over 40 Cr people in India in different skills by 2022.The training is given by the skill development ministry along with ministries of agriculture, rural development, textiles, electronics and IT, etc.

 As per reports, the Skill India programme was launched with the target of training 400 Mn people in different skills by 2022. But, the campaign failed to accomplish the target and could train only 40 Mn people so far.

With the help of the new data platform, the Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship will be able to analyse the number of new entrants as well as the existing workforce that requires skill training and improvement in the existing skill-sets respectively.

As PK Sinha, Cabinet Secretary, said in a media statement, “The comprehensive data on the portal is expected to have twin benefits,” said the official cited above. “Firstly, we would get total number of skilled personnel in the country on a real-time basis and secondly this would help in deduplication so that resources are not wasted.”

This will eventually help the government in increase in the number of jobs, lift incomes and promote growth. It will also help in addressing  the existing mismatch between existing pool and the fast-changing skill sets.

“The first phase will be launched on July 15 and, over a period of time, when all stakeholders are on board, it is estimated that the number of skilled personnel could go as high as 15 Mn a year against 10 Mn estimated by the skills development ministry,” added Sinha.

The need to build a national skills portal was first proposed by PK Sinha, after which he decided to bring all central ministries on board to converge their skilling programmes. The portal is being launched to support youth which enters the country’s workforce every year but is left  unemployed because of poor skill-sets.

The Skill Development Ministry claims to have trained 6 Mn youth a year through training institutes, apprenticeship programmes, NSDC training and Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojna(PMKY) has trained close to 5 Mn candidates across the country at a cost of $442 Mn (INR 3K Cr)

In the latest budget of 2018, the Government had taken initiative to induce skill training programmes for teachers as well as Indian youth. Such initiatives will prompt the Indian youth to focus on skill training and will lead to an increase in online skilling startups.

[The development was reported by ET.]