Whose Stake Is It Anyway? – Part 2
The Stakeholders
There are a thousand universities and tens of thousands of institutions and government initiatives like Skill India engaged in making our people educated, skilled and knowledgeable. Yet only 8% of these employable graduates are getting selected in interviews.
Increasing the employability quotient is a perpetual process. It needs several resources engaged continuously to not just sustain a certain level of employability, but increase it
The Government – Education, Empowerment & Employment
The Government is undoubtedly the biggest stakeholder. It is the initiator through policies and resource allocation and incentivizing participating private bodies in creating work opportunities for our youth.
Most of the initiatives of the government are towards making our youth employable, making education possible and enabling educational institutions through grants and other benefits. There are schemes and initiatives to engage with youth beyond education too like the Skill India initiative where millions of them are trained for skills and trades that strengthen their acumen further. The skills and trades taught in the Skill India initiative are recommended by sector skill councils. Each of the skills recommended by the sector skill councils is prescribed after thorough research by experienced professionals from the Industry. With over 450 training partners and counting, the government’s target is to train some 400 million youth by the end of 2022. Impressive.
But, and this is a big BUT! National Skills Development Corporation has admitted that only half of the millions trained so far since 2012 have been able to get jobs. It is a clear indicator that enhancing the skills of our youth through training them is not enough to get them to work opportunities. There is more to be done. The question, however, is who should do it? Is it the government? Or the other stakeholders?
If creating work for employable youth either in the form of jobs or business opportunities is the end goal then we need to have a deeper, critical look at work opportunities to understand them.
Work opportunities are like windows that open simultaneously at different places. While the government has been successful in creating millions of work opportunities, the paradox of the working kind continues. We have a situation where there are jobs created in the skilled and semi-skilled sector that go unfilled due to lack of employable people and yet, on the other hand, we have enough and more people in the unskilled sector without work opportunities. There you have it, the paradox! We have jobs but no people to fill them and at the same time we have people with no jobs to offer them.
Every opportunity created but not taken is a colossal waste. We need to make sure that every opportunity created is taken. To make that happen, we need more people that qualify to take those opportunities. Qualification here is not education, it is more. It is not just about making more people educated but making more such educated people skilled and then making these educated skilled people accessible and available for work opportunities created.
Employment is the responsibility of the government, but employability is the responsibility of the individual. All the government must do here is to empower the individual in becoming more employable.
We will discuss the stakes of the Individual and the empowerment the individual needs to increase employability in the next part.
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