Making India future-ready

Empowering the upcoming working generation with skill upgradation and hands-on industrial training is a significant booster for reducing India’s current economic pressure. The article talks about the importance of upskilling workforce in India, while highlighting the key milestones for achieving sustainable growth.

- Neha Basudkar Ghate

Upskilling workforce is considered the backbone of a country’s plans for framing futuristic sustainable growth. Especially in a country like India, where millions of youths are knocking on the job market every year, there is a dire requirement to provide various kinds of innovative and required training. This can help them become employable for the industry and at the same time, their creative potential could be utilised for the overall development of the country.

Skills development & upgradation can reduce unemployment and underemployment, increase productivity, and improve standards of living. And if undertaken with the focus on contributing to structural transformation, it automatically results in labour productivity, enabling public and private investment in education and better economic growth.

Market outlook: Skill development

In 2015, the ‘Skill India Mission’ under the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship aimed to train over 40 crore people in India in different skills by 2022. But the pandemic turned the market dynamics upside down, this created a huge setback for to meet the target. However, India is slowly but steadily regaining its foothold in the skilling and employment space. According to the Global Skills Gap report, the Indian workforce reported the highest skills gap after Brazil. Currently, India has one of the largest workforces in the world. Nearly 500 million people are within the working age group, while the domestic labour market ranks second to China.