Centre to put in Rs 5,291 crore to spruce up ITIs

The tug of war between the state governments and private players over the control on modernisation of Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) has finally forced the Manmohan Singh government to fund the process on its own, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Aug 12, 2009, 24:04:49 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The tug of war between the state governments and private players over the control on modernisation of Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) has finally forced the Manmohan Singh government to fund the process on its own.

The Union government will pump in more money to modernise the 1,896 ITIs across the country, which at present enroll over five lakh students.

The government earmarked Rs 5,291 crore to rejuvenate these institutes, which include Rs 1,581 crore from the World Bank and Rs 3,550 crore it hoped to raise through the Public Private Partnership (PPP) model.

While the institutes managed to spend just 7.35 per cent of allocated funds since 2007, the government received only Rs 41.88 crore from industry.

The private partners were reluctant to invest since the state governments were not ready to share control with them, informed a senior government functionary, not willing to be quoted.

While rejuvenating the National Skill Development Mission (NSDM), Singh announced in 2008 that the government was looking at adopting an industry-prescribed curriculum to make the pass-outs more employable.

There was also the need to ensure job training of students with the industry, a Planning Commission official said.

With only two per cent of the workforce being skilled, if the number did not grow substantially, the employability of young Indians would be restricted to menial jobs only, insiders pointed out.

The situation could also affect India’s ambition to lead in the services sector, which provides a much-needed impetus to the economy’s overall growth of the country.

The government is also planning to take a new approach of professional alliance with the private sector.

It feels this would be necessary to check chronic problems like huge shortage of teaching staff and high dropout rates.

Creating better and modern ITIs to meet the needs of industry was the core of the NSDM.

Its failure is likely to raise alarm bells. This is so because the national workforce is likely to go up by 45 million over the Eleventh Plan period (2007-2012) while the country needed to employ nearly 58 million people to meet public aspirations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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