Govt committed to impart skill training to youth: Rudy

NEW DELHI, Feb 25:
Government today said it is committed to impart skill and training to the youth and link skill development to higer education globally.
“We are making efforts to link skilling to education. Worldwide, people can do Ph.D and higher studies in skills like plumbing and welding,” Skills Development and Entrepreneurship Minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy said in Rajya Sabha.
Replying to supplementaries, Rudy said there is a need to link skill to education which has not been done in the past over six decades.
He said as per NSSO data, India has only 4 per cent of the skilled workforce as compared to 96 per cent in Korea and 80 per cent in China.
He said his Ministry was providing soft loans to organisations working in this area and added that since it is a new Ministry, it lacked infrastructure. He added that the Skill Development department was working in association with 24 ministries and was implementing 70 schemes.
Rudy said the government has recently launched Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana which is grant-model unlike 13,000 ITIs which is a paid model. The Ministry, he said, was also taking adequate steps to provide training to the women and widows.
The National Policy for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, 2015 is the country’s first integrated national policy for developing skills and promoting entrepreneurship on a large scale. It acknowledges the need for an effective roadmap for promotion of entrepreneurship as the key to a successful skills strategy.
The vision of the policy is to create an ecosystem of empowerment by skilling on a large scale at speed with high standards and to promote a culture of innovation-based entrepreneurship which can generate wealth and employment so as to ensure sustainable livelihoods for all citizens, he said.
Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) is the flagship outcome-based skill training scheme of the new Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship (MSDE), which aims at skill certification and reward scheme is to enable and mobilise a large number of Indian youth to take up outcome- based skill training and become employable and earn their livelihood. (PTI)