CII Summit in Mumbai highlights challenge and promise of skills building

By 2026, nearly 65 percent of the Indian population will be in the working age, said Adi Godrej, ex-president of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and chairman, Godrej Group, at the Sixth Global summit on skill Development in Mumbai, held on November 10.

Contextualising this comment in his special address, Godrej set this against a situation where only five percent of the working Indian population is appropriately skilled and in which the quality of skillsets in manufacturing lag that of services.

His views segued in with others who spoke on the subject during the Summit including Pramod Bhasin, head of CII’s National Committee of Skill Development and founder and vice-chairman of Genpact, who said that that a million people entering the workforce every year, the need isnot only for effective training but awareness as well.

In his remarks, Bhasin also alluded to a key aspect of the Indian job market when he said that old ideas about jobs continue to prevail but that is beginning to change now. The challenge for India is to leverage the demographic bulge into workable skills for India and abroad.

Dilip Chenoy, CEO and MD of the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), said his organisation had taken several initiatives including rationalising the skills department within the organization, started a skills voucher, and is focusing on the skills requirements of medium and small enterprises. NSDC, he said is working closely with the private sector. It has set up 21 sector skills centres and has roped in 156 training partners.

Fleshing out the theme of skills and productivity, Bhasin said that at present, the Indian worker’s skills are 15 percent of that of his US counterpart, which was an unacceptable fact. It is now up to industry to remedy this and urgently.

Discussions during the summit focused on the fact the private sector needs to do much more than it is at present to invest to skills building.

The audience heard the views and experiences of people in vocational and skills training from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Canada. It also heard the views of Australian MP Ian Macfarlane, the minister for industry.

One speaker from the automotive segment, G S Venkatesh Kumar dwelt in some detail on what Hyundai does and stressing that it is important to ensure that skills training impacts a company’s bottomline, whether that company is big or small.

The Summit had 100 skills providers from Australia attending with that nation being the partner country for the event this year. The bottom-line perspective of the summit was that skills honed locally can be leveraged abroad and that ultimately, each country needs to debate and arrive at a model that reflects its situation and works best for it.