Handyman and other vocational jobs get a leg up as India tackles unemployment

NEW DELHI (BLOOMBERG) - India is seeking to boost the aspirational value of jobs such as plumbing, carpentry and beautician to make more people employable in a market with one of the world's largest working-age populations.

Changing perceptions towards handyman jobs and increasing training capacity are the objectives of India's skills programme, Mr K.P. Krishnan, the top bureaucrat in the skill development ministry, said in an interview.

Ministry officials are visiting institutes to discuss with students the importance of acquiring vocational skills and apprenticeship programmes, he said.

Creating opportunities for the young workforce is a key pledge of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he prepares to seek re-election early next year. Failure to do that risks quickly turning the nation's so-called demographic dividend - more than 60 per cent of the population is in the working age group of 15-59 years - into a disaster and stalling the current world-beating pace of economic growth.

Mr Krishnan said that Mr Modi had asked officials at a meeting: "How many of you have been to convocation ceremony of a vocational college?" Not one had gone. The Prime Minister then asked: "How will it become aspirational then?"

India's gross domestic product growth, now at more than 7 per cent, hasn't created enough jobs for the 12 million people entering the workforce every year. Part of the reason is a lack of skilled manpower and a reluctance to accept certain jobs which are considered menial by society.

Barely 5 per cent of its workforce has formal vocational skills, compared with 75 per cent in Germany and 96 per cent in South Korea.

"Acquisition of skills isn't aspirational. It's a very deep social issue with roots in our caste system. People would rather become clerks, peons in government offices, than hairdressers. The paradox is a hairdresser will actually earn more than a peon," Mr Krishnan said.

"We are now carving out educational pathways."

To make skill training aspirational, the government is opening up avenues for higher education. Borrowing from the community college concept of the United States, it has created a framework for transfer of credits acquired in vocational training. For instance, it is working out how a general duty assistant in healthcare can become a nurse.

India needs to skill and re-skill 400 million people in four years, and the government estimates it will spend US$79 billion (S$110 billion) on it. It has been pumping in money to build training capacity, but misuse of those funds makes the task difficult.

To stop that and enhance the employability of skilled labour, it is planning to set up a regulator, according to Mr Krishnan.

By the government's own admission, India has a very narrow timeframe to harness its demographic dividend and overcome its skill shortage, as the ageing of society means there will be more people older than 59 than in the working-age population by 2040.

The South Asian country's current capacity at over 14,000 Industrial Training Institutes is about a tenth of the 15 million people it needs to train every year. About 36 million have been trained under various government-funded programmes in the last four years.

The government said it doesn't have data on placements, as various skills programmes have different structures.

"Increasing the scale of vocational training is priority number one. Second is quality. The employability of a lot of our graduates is poor," Mr Krishnan said.