​Indian skilled workforce’s ‘Achche din’ have arrived

India is one of the youngest nations in the world with more than 54% of the total population below 25 years of age. Yet today less than 5% of the potential workforce gets formal skill training to be employable and stay employable. In order to generate employment, the Narendra Modi government has come up with initiatives like Make in India and Skill India.

It seems that these initiatives are paying off and creating job opportunities and scope for the development of the talented workforce in India. The country seems to have added more than double the number of jobs between July and December 2014 as against the corresponding period of the previous year revealed in an Economic Times report.

According to the ET report, a labour ministry survey, which was released on Wednesday, stated that 2.75 lakh jobs were created in eight key sectors during the six months, registering an increase of 118% over 1.26 lakh jobs created in the year-ago period.

The survey further stated that the number of jobs created in the October-December quarter at 1.17 lakh was, however, less than 1.58 lakh jobs created in the previous quarter or 1.82 lakh jobs created in the April-June quarter.

To accelerate job creation in the country, one of the 10-point economic agenda of the BJP-led NDA government, the Centre set up a dedicated skill development ministry to focus on imparting skills to millions of youth in the country to make them employable.

It is estimated that 12 million youth enter the country's workforce each year and over 5% of this are skilled workforce. Rituparna Chakraborty, president of the Indian Staffing Federation, said, "There is certainly an upswing in the number of jobs created in the country. But that is largely because of improvement in sentiments and the huge optimism around the initiatives of the new government. However, the real test is now and it is time that the government actually took steps to execute some of its labour related initiatives so as to sustain the momentum.”

This survey covered 2,077 sample units across eight selected sectors that included apparels, leather, metals, automobiles, gems & jewellery, transport, IT/BPO and handloom/powerloom. It also revealed, IT/BPOs led the sectors in job creation, with 89,000 new jobs, followed by 79,000 jobs created in textile and apparels and 1,000 in leather sector.

The survey concluded, "While employment of direct workers went up by 1.01 lakh, hiring of contract workers was up by 16,000 during the quarter ended December, 2014 and a significant portion of the workforce were employed in units catering to the domestic market with employment in non-exporting units higher by 82,000 while number of people employed in exporting units up by 35,000 during the October-December quarter."
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