The Education System Had A Bias Against Skills

WHEN PRIME MINISTER Narendra Modi decided to create a new ministry of skill development and entrepreneurship, he zeroed in on young BJP leader Rajiv Pratap Rudy to head it. Rudy, a doer, has led from the front, and helped craft a new language for skill development where none existed. In an interview with BW Businessworld’s Suman K. Jha, Rudy says skilling never had an aspirational value in the country, and that he’s determined to change the mindset.

- Suman K. Jha

Your ministry just completed two years. What are your achievements as you recount the last two years’ journey?

Most important was to set up an ecosystem.

The foremost challenge for our ministry was to finalise the language for skills. Previously, 24 ministries across the union government were doing skilling. So to say that skilling started in this country when I took over, or when our ministry was created by the Prime Minister, would not be fair.

However, the language for skills was not defined. There was hardly any alignment on the common objective of skilling. Whatever they thought made for skilling was formulated and work began on it.

Our ministry was created by the PM as his own personal initiative. There was no file movement, no suggestion from the cabinet secretariat. From his own experience in Gujarat, he said ‘I want to do it’. This is something that he is passionate about. Occasionally, he has mentioned the one ministry that he would have loved to run himself was this ministry.

Hence, this came as a challenge. Convergence became a major issue because to define skills — both nationally and internationally — there was a problem.

Initially, the government of India had a ministry of education. Subsequently, it felt that education was not good enough and that human resources needed restructuring to include skilling and vocational education. So skills was added, and the ministry became Human Resource Development (HRD). But I personally feel, for whatever reasons, the education system always had a distinct bias against skills.

Education, research, scientific achievements will see inventions, but the application has to be by someone skilled. The second part was not addressed in the history of India. At best, it was on an ad hoc basis.