It is time to work towards correcting the definition of job beyond employment said Union Minister of Labour and Employment and Youth Affairs and Sports Mansukh Mandaviya. He and Union Minister for Education Dharmendra Pradhan were speaking at an event where the World Bank’s ‘Job at your Doorstep’ report was released.
While Pradhan drew attention to the fact that only continuous upskilling and reskilling of the workforce will future-proof them, according to Mandaviya, it is necessary to include informal education in academic education.
The report delves into the link between education and the jobs agenda of the country. It examines the job landscape of six states—Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha and Rajasthan—and identifies the key priority sectors and roles that offer the highest employment potential for students graduating from secondary school. It is hoped that such a report by the World Bank with a pan-India framework will provide in-depth diagnostics on skilling and jobs. This, in turn, will allow stakeholders to create new architectures and make progressive policies for empowering the Indian population. The need for broadening the definition of jobs and employment was felt so that there are better economic opportunities and true empowermen.
Skilling, it was emphasised, should begin at the school level itself. This will be facilitated by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which envisions mainstreaming skilling in schools.
Attention was drawn to the fact that only continuous upskilling and reskilling of the workforce will future-proof them. Pradhan believes that this can happen with the ‘whole-of-a-government’ approach to collaboratively skill, upskill and reskill India’s large population so that the country becomes the skill capital of the world.
The Government of India has an ambitious plan to transform the economy towards a high-income country status by 2047. The first step towards this goal would be India to urgently address challenges facing its employment landscape and prepare its workforce. Only multifaceted, dynamic, convergent approaches aligned to educational reform and market-linked skill development (SD) will help the country reach its job growth potential.
Reforms by the Government of India will help strengthen the vocational education sector to become a decentralised, local market-led, inclusive and fiscally sustainable sector, to train the workforce for the skills required for a high-income India.
The Ministry of Education has already taken a step in the right direction by NEP 2020 and the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2023. Both policies emphasise the importance of skilling in schools, with the NEP setting ambitious targets of 50 per cent of students accessing skill education by 2025 and all secondary schools offering skill education by 2030.
The ‘Jobs at Your Doorstep’ reports is a skills gap analysis that attempts to align trades offered in schools and the industry-specific needs of the districts where the schools are present. The study was initiated to reimagine the skill education offering through in-depth primary as well as secondary research in six states.
It is pertinent to mention here that the World Bank assists the Ministry of Education with its programme called Strengthening Teaching-Learning and Results for States (STARS) covering the six states mentioned earlier.
