For hard-nosed entrepreneurs as well as trustees of endowments looking towards swelling their corpuses, promotion of vocat-ional education and training (VET) schools/institutes is a promising diversification. For one, so long as the institute awards a ‘certificate’ rather than diploma or degree, it is spared the unwanted attentions and nuisance value of bureaucrats in the HRD and education ministries of the Central and state governments. In effect this means that VET institutes enjoy the freedom to establish and administer themselves, i.e determine their tuition fee struc-tures and admission processes. In turn this means that ‘profit’ is not a dirty word in this high-potential neglected sector of Indian education.
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The plain truth is that because of decades of neglect of education despite hosting the world’s largest population of youth, 21st century India is vastly under-skilled. While communist China has established 500,000 VET institutes during the past 60 years including 350,000 in the rural hinterland with an aggregate enrolment of 90 million youth, India’s VET track record is 1,896 government-promoted Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and 3,218 private sector ITCs (Industrial Training Centres) with an aggregrate enrolment of 3.5 million.
With the country’s schools, colleges and universities churning out armies of the unemployable and unskilled, over 300 million youth countrywide are in disguised unemplo-yment or under-employed, even as Indian industry and the economy across the board are experiencing a grave shortage of skilled personnel. CLSA- Asia Pacific estimates current expenditure on VET countrywide at a mere $1.4 billion (Rs.6,300 crore) when it should be ten times as much.
Following intense pressure from industry and enlightened educationists, last October (2009), the Union govern-ment and several industry organisations including FICCI, CII and Assocham jointly promoted the National Skills Development Corporation with a corpus of Rs.1,000 crore to facilitate skills development countrywide. NSDC’s mandate is to promote VET institutes and training centres. “NSDC’s goal is to contribute significantly — at least 30 percent — to the overall skilling and upskilling target of 500 million citizens by the year 2022 set by prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, by fostering private sector initiatives in skills development,” M.V. Subbiah chairman of the Chennai-based Murugappa Group and first chairman of NSDC told EducationWorld earlier this year (see EW special report feature on VET, February 2010).
Since it became operational this summer, NSDC has approved funding aggregating to Rs.315 crore to 12 edupreneurs including the well-known Mumbai-based NGO Pratham and the Bharati Airtel Group. Meanwhile the Delhi-based education major Educomp Solutions has joined forces with the London-based Pearson Educa-tion to promote the IndiaCan Education Pvt. Ltd and the Manipal Education Group has tied up with the London-based City & Guilds to establish VET institutes countrywide.
“Although several large companies and groups have entered this sector, the aggregate demand for VET hugely outstrips supply. Soft loans and advice — and soon course content — are available from NSDC, and there is every indication that within the next decade the revenue of VET institutes will exceed that of the Rs.30,000 crore coaching classes and exam prep industry,” says Krishan Khanna, the Mumbai-based champion of VET for the past three decades.