Need to make internship scheme mandatory

HR experts say important to monitor progress of upskilling schemes; existing partnerships with industry need to be strengthened Mumbai, 28 August M andating India Inc to comply with the Centre's new internship scheme, which aims to skill 10 million youngsters in five years, may lead to better results, said human resources (HR) experts on Wednesday.

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Speaking at Business Standard's BSmart HR Conclave on 'Shaping Tomorrow's Workforce', senior executives from the industry and academia said that the scheme's success, which was currently voluntary, depended on the execution.

They also said that a monitoring mechanism was required to map the learning progress made by interns.

The session saw Amit Das, country HR leader, and board member, Novo Nordisk India; Suryanarayan G Iyer, head, human capital management, cloud solution engineering team, Oracle India; Ruhie Pande, group chief HR officer, Sterlite Power; and Hema Bajaj, head, faculty, MBA-HR, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) discuss the interplay between jobs and skills.

Terming the internship scheme a "great intention" on the part of the government, Das said "mandate always works better in India" and it would be a good idea to make the scheme mandatory.

In her Budget speech last month, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said that the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) would collaborate with the top 500 companies to channel resources towards industrial skills training.

Under the scheme, interns would receive a monthly stipend of ₹5,000 and a one-time assistance of ₹6,000.

The companies would cover the cost of training these interns through their corporate social responsibility (CSR) fund.

Unlike apprenticeship programmes, companies will not be obligated to offer permanent positions to interns.

On Wednesday, the panelists concurred that the programme was a "great idea at a mammoth level", adding that humans could differentiate themselves from machines by learning the skills of the future: Art of judgement and contextualisation. The challenge was to create a mechanism to monitor the progress in skilling.