Rural skills-for-jobs training slumps

The Telegraph: New Delhi: Monday, December 18, 2017.

A central scheme for skill training and jobs for rural youths has been witnessing below-target placement levels for the past five years, with the government's failure to answer key questions suggesting it is not monitoring the programme closely.

Most of the training under the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana is provided by NGOs - who are paid for it - and a few state government institutes. Their mandate is to ensure that at least 75 per cent of the successful trainees find jobs with a minimum monthly salary of Rs 6,000.

Replies to an RTI query from The Telegraph show that the placement levels have slumped well below the target since 2012-13 and that youth participation in the programme has been erratic. (See chart)

However, several other questions in the RTI application remained unanswered.

Based on feedback that many of the youths who were finding placement were being sacked within a couple of months, this newspaper had sought the percentage of youths continuing on the job beyond six months.

"The data is not maintained in the ministry," the reply from S.B. Tiwari, undersecretary in the rural development ministry, said.

To questions seeking the names of the NGOs involved in the scheme, and asking whether any NGO has been indicted for any lapse, Tiwari said the ministry did not maintain such data.

Santosh Kumar Mehrotra, a teacher at the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies at JNU, said the duration of the training was too short to make anybody employable.

According to the scheme, the training can last three months, six months, nine months or a year. Officials said that most NGOs offered three-month courses.

Mehrotra said the training should last at least a year and include industry experience and practical training by professionals. "It's not possible to make rural youths industry-ready in three months. The government wants to say it has given skill training to these many youths, but the effort lacks sincerity," he said.

Originally, the scheme was part of a wider employment programme, the Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana, introduced in 2004. Swarnajayanti was later replaced by the National Rural Livelihood Mission, whose skill-training component was named after Upadhyaya by the NDA government in 2014.