India continues to treat skilling as an extracurricular activity rather than a part of mainstream education, said B.V.R. Subrahmanyam, CEO, NITI Aayog, during his keynote address at the Bengaluru Skill Summit organised by the Government of Karnataka.
“Skilling is yet to be part of our country’s education system, unfortunately. This is at the root of the problem India is currently facing. Since our curriculum lacks general employability skill training, a majority of our population remains hugely unskilled, doing very low-paying jobs or even staying unemployed,’’ Subrahmanyam said mournfully.
In his address to law/policy makers, educators, industry leaders, and start-ups, Subrahmanyam emphasised that India needs to change its mindset and focus on skilling its people of all ages: young, old, students, women, farmers and others. Particularly talking about the country’s large farmer population, he stated that India’s 50-crore farmers need to be trained in order to modernise agriculture.
“We are actually putting people in silos and treating skilling as something separate. Actually, skilling has to be an integral part of the education system and skilling has to be thrown open to people of all ages — 20, 30, 40, 50 or 60 years,’’ Subrahmanyam explained.
India, Subrahmanyam believes, is an important inflexion point, with a positive growth trajectory and favourable geopolitics. As such, he insisted that the country needs to invest in its demographic dividend.
“If we don’t, our demographic advantage can be a curse for us,” Subrahmanyam elaborated. “Only a skilled, employable, well-earning workforce having a productive livelihood will power India to become a $30 trillion economy by 2047, with each individual expected to contribute $18,000 (per capita income) to the economy.’’
What India needs, as per Subrahmanyam, is integrated academic, skill and vocational training schools and institutes on a large scale. He added how many people in India have taken wrong paths to education, taken up courses and wasted their time. This has led to 35-40-year-olds who think their life is over.
In order to counter such scenarios, he suggested establishing a system that maps skills, brings people and jobs to a common platform and facilitates proper communication between different educational platforms. This, he believes, will help create diverse career roadmaps, define skill sets, identify new job roles, and create newer and better employment opportunities.
Subrahmanyam also talked about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on employment. He stated that while AI might remove roles, it will not replace jobs. He shared that while AI might indeed take away about 40 lakh jobs in India, it is also expected to create over 60 lakh new jobs. This, he clarified, means that despite certain roles vanishing, the net effect of AI will ultimately be more jobs in the market.
“The opportunities that AI brings will depend entirely on how fast we reskill and redeploy our people,” said Subrahmanyam.
