Government to set up 100 colleges to impart vocational training

Updated on: Monday, September 10, 2012

Admitting that skill development was a big challenge for the government, HRD Minister Kapil Sibal said plans were on the anvil to start 100 colleges during the current academic session to impart vocational training.

"Of these 100 community colleges, Canada will partner in setting up of 10 colleges," Sibal told a global skills summit here.

He said the government has recently launched a vocational educational programme in around 40 schools in Haryana and it would be done all over the country in the coming months.

S Ramadorai, adviser to the Prime Minister on skill development, expressing concern over the quality of skill development training, emphasised on bringing about a "dramatic change" in the programme.

"There is various serious systemic problem in our training eco-system...This issue needs to be accorded top priority if we are to achieve our goals," he said.

He said the challenges are the quality of inputs that go into training, infrastructure, training methodologies and acute shortage of faculty in vocational education.

"Over emphasis on paper qualification and indifference regarding actual work experience and skills has resulted in a situation where badly qualified instructor with little work experience are training people at workplace using obsolete technologies and non-functional machinery," Ramadorai said.

The statement assumes significance as India aims at providing skill development training to 500 million people by 2022 to drive its economic growth.

Noting that traditional teachers do not possess domain expertise and industry professional need to acquire teaching skills, Ramadorai said vocational institutes must have a fair representation from industry.

Earlier in the event, industry body FICCI and Association of Canadian Community Colleges signed an MoU to collaborate in skill development.

Government to set up 100 colleges to impart vocational training

More Education news