Skill development training for unemployed youth

Chennai, Dec 17 (UNI) The Centre was committed to providing skill development to the unemployed youth by training 10,000 people per year under the recently launched new National Skill Development Mission(NSDM) by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, according to a senior government official.

Talking to reporters on the sidelines of a national workshop on ''Skills and Knowledge for Improved Livelihoods and Living Standards (SKILLS)'' organised by the Tiruchirapalli Regional Engineering College and Science and Technology Entrepreneurs Park (TREC-STEP) Skills Academy here, Mr H K Mittal, Advisor and Head, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, said under the scheme the Centre would create one crore jobs a year.

He said by 2020 the median age of the Indian population would be 29 years and there would be about 4.7 crore surplus people in this age group facing job requirements.

'There will be shortfall of 10 million people in China at that time and the population in Europe and Western countries will be much older in age''.

''We will be having requisite manpower, but they will not be adequately skilled'', he added.

Keeping this in mind the governemnt had given enough focus to skills development activity with a huge investment to provide training in new and innovate skill areas as the technology has advanced rapidly.

Mr R M P Jawahar, Executive Director of TREC-STEP said in association with the government and the UNDP, the organisation had set up five centres -- four in Tamil Nadu and one in Bangalore-- for providing a three-month course training on Modern Home Appliance products, Computer Hardware, Cell phone repair and maintenance, refrigeration and air-conditioners.

''The advances in these sectors are rapid and the requirements too have been increasing rapidly as even people in villages have ACs and TVs, requiring long-term maintenance'', he added.

While institutions like NIIT and Aptech could be successful in such Public-Private-Partnership initiative in high-end IT areas, the same PPP model could be adopted for training non-IT people.

Considering this, TREC-STEP Academy started skill training on Modern Appliance Products as a curriculum for the first time in India. It had so far trained 3,000 people for the last 18 months, which has assured a starting pay packet ranging from Rs 7,000 to Rs 10,000.

To keep these numbers growing, the national workshop was organised in which 50 institutions from 20 states even from far off places like Tripura and Jammu and Kashmir partcipated.

The instititions would replicate this model in PPP mode in their respective states and the TERC-STEP would provide the course content.

UNI