India to have its first skill university soon

India will soon get its first skill university for accreditation of skilling centers and to allow them to issue degrees and diplomas equivalent to conventional educational institutions. Employment exchanges in the country will also act as skill counseling centers.

Updated on: Sep 3, 2015, 21:44:05 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India will soon get its first skill university for accreditation of skilling centers and to allow them to issue degrees and diplomas equivalent to conventional educational institutions. Employment exchanges in the country will also act as skill counseling centers.

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These are some of the major recommendations of a sub-group of the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog firmed up after consultation with all states.

According to a senior functionary of the panel, the country’s first national skill university will provide guidance to skill training institutes being run by the government and the private sector on grading students on 10 point scale under the National Skill Qualification Framework (NSQF).

The framework organises qualification according to level of knowledge, skills and aptitude at par with formal education system. A person with no formal education can also get a certificate of equivalence to formal education like upper primary or higher secondary under the framework depending on his skill and knowledge of a particular profession. The framework allows one to upgrade his or her certification by training at different skill centers.

The new university will implement the framework in place of the All India Council for Technical Education which was mandated by the UPA government to do so. Sources said the AICTE under the HRD ministry was found wanting in its implementation as skill training programmes were run by different ministries.

As the government has created the skill development ministry as nodal point for skill management in the country, the proposed university will be under the ministry and will implement NSQF.

To prevent duplication of effort, the sub-group has recommended that the university should be nodal office to implement quality and standards in all skill training institutes across the country with a special focus on employability.

The sub-group has also recommended that employment exchanges across the country should be converted into skill counseling centers to help the youth to get trained for a job as per his or her aptitude. For this, the proposed university will provide a framework.

The panel has, however, rejected the idea of having a skill university in every state. “The states have agreed to get their skill training centers accredited to the new university,” an official said.

The NITI Aayog has also negated the proposal of right to skill as suggested by skill development minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy. The sub-group suggested the government can bring a right to skill policy as done in Chhattisgarh which provides a “holistic” approach towards achieving the goal of providing skill to all youth.

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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