The difference is, this time it has been brought to people’s notice more clearly than before. This probably is because of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s penchant for effective utilization of Indian youths’ inherent skills into national development processes. Can we call it a geographical indicator that the PM is tacitly trying to bring into the national debate?

Even though the motto is promising, the task set ahead for the stakeholders requires non-stop monitoring. And this cannot be an easy foolproof practice sitting in an armchair cocooned in a sprawling air-conditioned cabin. Though the current government’s stand to ensure full elbow-room for the bureaucrats at their duties and tasks is a clever strategy to avoid scopes of direct leg-pulling from the political opponents, the task of instituting the ‘Make India’ vision in national skills development mission requires more professional approach at the grassroots levels, where the hands are waiting for opportunities for work.

In 2009, Indira Gandhi National Open University was assigned the task of setting up five national-level skills training institutes in five rural zones of the country, including the North East region, which spent a lot of money in logistics, but the real work did not take off enough.

Another grand venture that the university started was instituting for the first time in the country the Community Colleges, with ideas for developing natural skills for geographical indicators, which, as we all know, today is in jeopardy.

Neither the current management of the University is capable of doing anything about its restoration, nor there seems to be enough willingness at addressing the corrective measures to re-introduce them.

Today, it has almost developed into a socio-cultural problem in India’s education system, in which if a leader calls his/her bluff, nothing can be restructured into correctness easily.

Fundamental lacunae dog the skills mission in the country. The common belief that the skills are honed at institution levels, and that the experts are asked to train youths to fine-tune their innate skills suiting to industries, is perhaps much too utopian in concept. The motto of the NDSE and NSDC definitely aim this utopian scheme and that is what the past Cabinets immediately envisioned too. But one can argue, that the results of such an idealised skills training do not appear satisfactory to any corporate body for reasons best known only to the NSDE and NSDC.

We need to have also a parallel route for skills development — the route to train at corporates’ shop-floors. As Medium, Small and Mini Enterprises (MSMEs) need to be supported in the country for bolstering the Gross Domestic Products (GDP), and thus the economy, similarly youths gathered from the raw ambience also need to be given jobs to grow and prosper. This needs to be the national mission. The idea of putting these raw work-hands, gathered from the length and breadth of the country, into the shop-floors of the MSMEs may not be so bad an idea.

The MSMEs always face challenges to survive. Their challenges are two-fold: one, from the domestic competitions created by the big corporations, and two, from the foreign firms’ products compulsorily made available at competitive prices. To stymie these two-pronged competitions, the MSMEs have to employ quality trainers to get quality products, which can take the competitive challenges. The MSMEs therefore need national support both socio-culturally and financially.

Always in India, private sector has meant to be the big private corporations who work for their individual profits and glorify their success stories through a majorly blind Indian media for churning out more profits.

They did not take up enough the task of nation-building by accommodating the grassroots working hands of the country until compelled by law regarding setting up projects at rural Indian sites. Had they had accomplished at least half of this task in the past, India’s GDP today would have come close to China’s.

Therefore, the government must look deeply into the issues involved and create options in almost all visible areas, and refuse to concentrate into the big business houses alone, albeit secret pressures. It is an efficiency call for the government.

It needs to build up enough elbow-room for the MSMEs to prosper and expand, accommodating and training the new raw hands at their nascent skills, especially honing the skills at geographical indicators.

It needs to ensure real encouragement for the MSMEs by infusing funds for skills training at the floor-shop levels, advising them to rope in world class trainers, and rigidly monitoring both the fruitful utilisation of the funds and the quality of trainers at the grassroots levels.

The government should also consider the reality that the banks may have realistic loan management issues while clearing the project proposals. Funds, therefore, should also be sourced from the CSRs accumulated from both public and private sector corporations.

The Prime Minister’s recent tri-nation trip has created opportunities for looking at the basic issues of the MSMEs more closely. As it happens in Germany — where raw hands of youths are put to skills institutes in liaisoning with big corporations, and the corporations source their workers hands straight from the skills training institutes, — India must envision a direct sourcing method for bolstering the MSMEs. This may be more rewarding than just dreaming to set up MSMEs along the national highways. This may also become a successful FDR opportunity in near future. Dream you must, because it’s the dream which makes you act. (IPA Service)