Central Govt To Revamp National Policy For Skill Development & Entrepreneurship To Align With The Demands Of PLI Scheme

The central government is set to review the National Policy for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship to deliver improved productivity in order to match the international standards.

The aim is towards creating a large talent pool of skilled workforce who can participate in investments that are made under the government’s production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme that caters to around a dozen different sectors presently.

The government is likely to appoint a national-level institution that has expertise on skilling to assess the impact of the scheme and thereby come up with recommendations to alter the current policy or even form a new one to deliver better results in the coming five years.

In fact, the need to remodel the policy has arisen from the low standards of skilling that continue to plague the industry’s demand of skilled manpower.

About 10 million youth have been trained in the previous five years in the areas of ITI, apprenticeship and other similar methods under the government’s flagship Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana.

One of the senior officials from the government told the Economic Times that a decision towards revamping the policy was taken in a recent second steering committee meeting of the National Skills Development Mission.

The lack of a skilled workforce also stalls India’s capabilities to attract investments from overseas, and hence the intervention by PMO and other ministries becomes the need of the hour.

The prime objective of the PLI scheme is to make manufacturing in India globally competitive by removing sectoral disabilities, creating economies of scale and ensuring efficiencies.

Last year, the government had allocated $26 billion to PLI schemes across 13 sectors to incentivise manufacturing firms to grow bigger over the next five years and make India an integral part of the global supply chains.