NN46, September 2011
Towards a New Global World of Skills Development? TVET's turn to Make its Mark
Skill Development Initiatives: Private-Public Partnership and Private Initiatives in India
By Santosh Mehrotra, Institute for Applied Manpower Research, New Delhi
Email: santoshmeh@gmail.com
Keywords: Upgrading ITIs via PPPs; private ITIs; private skill development companies; National Vocational Education Qualification Framework
Summary: This note focuses on government efforts to promote skill through the private sector and through private public partnerships (PPPs).
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There are essentially four initiatives taken by the Government of India since 2007 to encourage skill up-gradation by using the instrument of Private-Public Partnership (PPP) and, in addition, encouragement to private sector initiatives to up-grade skills:
- 1. Of the 1896 government-run Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs), in all of them the Ministry of Labour decided to introduce a PPP-based model of reform in 2007.
- 2. About 2000 privately owned and managed industrial training centres, now called private ITIs, existed in 2007, the number of which has grown to 6498 in India by 2011.
- 3.The National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) is supporting the setting up of profit-making companies, since 2010, to promote skill up-gradation.
- 4.The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has proposed in the country a National Vocational Education Qualification Framework (NVEQF), to be promoted by the NSDC jointly with Government; this will rely heavily upon private sector industry involvement in the provision of vocational education and training.
- This note deals briefly with each of these four efforts for skill up-gradation undertaken within the last three years by the Government of India.
PPP in government-run ITIs
Government-owned and managed ITIs (under the jurisdiction of the central government’s Ministry of Labour) have been the main instrument for children completing class 8 or 10 in school to obtain vocational training. ITIs offer courses lasting 1-4 years all across the country, though they tend to be concentrated in the more industrialized southern and western states of India. The 11th Five Year Plan, which for the first time had a whole chapter devoted to skill development (Chapter 4, Vol. 1), essentially had two ways of promoting vocational training through the ITI system in India. First, 500 of the 1896 ITIs (in 2007) were chosen as Centers of Excellence, in which only one or two trades of the 10-15 that are normally offered, were selected for the purposes of promotion as Centres of Excellence on a PPP basis. Of the 500 Centres of Excellence (CoE) to be created in ITIs, 100 are being supported by the Government of India and 400 by the World Bank. Second, the remaining 1396 ITIs were not to give any special focus on any particular trade, but were to receive Central Government funding for improving the infrastructure for skill development across all trades. For both the Centres of Excellence as well as the remaining ITIs the PPP mode took the following forms: new Institutional Management Committees (IMCs). New Institutional Management Committees consisting of both the ITI Principal as well as private sector industrial representatives were to participate in managing the ITIs. The experience with IMCs in the last three years has left a lot to be desired, as was found in a nation-wide study of ITIs conducted by the Institute of Applied Manpower Research (IAMR) in 2010-11. “The role of IMC in the management of the CoEs did not appear to be very encouraging. Most of the CoEs surveyed during the study reported that in terms of starting new trades, up-gradation of new trades, placement support and training support, the role of IMCs was mostly either ‘good’ or ‘fair’ (on a 5-point scale, which went up to ’Excellent’ and ‘Very Good’). On the other hand, in providing financial support, its role was described as ‘poor’. The greatest problem faced by almost all the CoEs was the shortage of teachers.”
Private Industrial Training Institutes
In 2007 when the Government of India decided to initiate a Skill Development Initiative there were just under 2000 private ITIs in the country. However, in the wake of the Government’s focus on skill development in the 11th Five Year Plan, there took place a rapid increase in the number of private ITIs to nearly 6498 within three years. While this quantitative expansion of vocational training providers (VTPs) increased the availability of facilities for skill up-gradation in the country, the quality of training being imparted by these thousands of new VTPs could be open to question. The number of trades offered by private ITIs, as we found in the recent IAMR study cited above, is usually under five; in contrast, government run ITIs offer anywhere between 10-15 trades in their programmes. The private ITIs are also not professionally managed nor regulated well by government.
The Private Partners of NSDC
As part of the Government of India’s Skill Development Initiative (which started in 2007 with the 11th Five Year Plan), three institutions were created: the Prime Minister’s Skill Development Advisory Council, the National Skill Development Coordination Board (chaired by the Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission), and the PPP-based National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC). The NSDC is jointly funded by the private sector, and the Government of India (51% private equity owned mainly by Confederation of Indian Industry, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Association of Chambers of Commerce, and 49% equity owned by the Ministry of Finance).
The NSDC is the operational arm of the 3-tier management structure of the government’s Skill Development Initiative. Since the second quarter of 2010, when NSDC acquired a Chief Executive Officer (CEO), NSDC has been rapidly supporting the creation of companies that are providing vocational training all across the country, on a profitable basis. The business model is as follows: NSDC finances the company start-ups through a combination of debt and equity, the debt part of which is to be re-paid by the business venture-cum-VTP over a number of years by providing vocational training to youth on a fee-paying basis. As many as 26 companies have started providing such training, all of which are required by agreement with NSDC to ensure 70% of their trainees get placed in industry.
National Vocational Education Qualification Framework (NVEQF) and the private sector
The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has since late 2010 been engaged in an exercise to widen the scope of vocational education in government schools and the higher education system. Two specific initiatives of MHRD in this regard are notable: one, the vocational education provided to higher secondary school students run by the government is to be expanded by increased plan funding for the vocational education stream, which has been available in higher secondary schools since 1986. Second, the MHRD created an expert group in early 2011 to prepare a blue print radically transforming vocational education in the secondary and higher secondary school system of India to be called the NVEQF. The NVEQF has already been agreed too, in principle, by State Education Ministers in June, 2011. The NVEQF is now in the process of being piloted in Haryana State. It involves the extension of vocational education to secondary level (classes 9-10), in addition to higher secondary level in government schools (classes 11-12). In addition, it involves the creation of National Occupation Standards by the private sector by Sector Skill Councils (to be created by NSDC), so that in the entire country all vocational stream students in secondary and higher secondary education, as well as in polytechnics and engineering colleges, will be trained by using common curriculum across the country, which will be based on these National Occupation Standards (NOSs). These NOSs must be accompanied by a competency-based curriculum which has to be developed by private sector industry, in collaboration with, at the central level, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), and at the state level the State Directorates of Technical Education. Moreover, certification for these courses and trades offered in the vocational stream of schools, polytechnics and engineering colleges, will all be jointly done by government and the private sector, so that youth can then be easily employed by industry. In other words, there has already begun a process which will lead to an expansion of training along these lines, which will gather the momentum over the years.