Search for a workable solution

Plugging the gap: Sharad Verma of Indo-Rama Synthetics, which has adopted the industrial training institute in Nagpur

For rural youth in India’s impoverished Vidharba region, the Saoner Industrial Training Institute is supposed to offer a route from local village life to coveted industrial jobs. But with an outdated curriculum, unmotivated teachers, limited equipment and lack of job placement services, the state-run vocational education centre has long struggled to fulfil that role.

Students are not the only losers. Fast-growing industries in the city of Nagpur, 60km away, have struggled to find trained workers to meet the manpower needs of their expanding operations. “There is a great shortage of right people here,” says Subhash Chawra, founder of Chawra Plastics, a speciality plastic packaging company. “I have a permanent board up, ‘Help and supervisors wanted’. But no one turns up.”

Yet Saoner’s dilapidated industrial training centre could be poised for revitalisation. A few months ago, the Vidharbha Industrial Association, a local business group, “adopted” the institute, as part of a nationwide effort by Indian industry to overhaul the government’s failing vocational education system.

Like many other Indian companies now taking state-run vocational training institutes under their wings, Nagpur-based industrialists hope the time and energy they invest to modernise the Saoner centre will help end India’s troubling labour paradox: a vast pool of unemployed youth and companies’ persistent difficulty finding qualified workers.

“It’s pure business,” says Atul Pande, the VIA treasurer, whose company, Eros, makes furniture and also owns car dealerships and service centres. “The speed and pace at which demand is going up, you need to upscale. You need capital and labour. Unless you have labour available, you cannot really produce.”

India began setting up industrial training institutes in 1952 to supply electricians, fitters, mechanics and other tradesmen for the large state enterprises that Jawaharlal Nehru, the first post-independence prime minister, envisioned as “the temples of modern India”. But while industrial production techniques have changed dramatically since then, India’s nearly 2,000 state-run vocational training centres have not. Decades-old, state-prescribed courses take no account of the technological revolution that has dramatically transformed industrial machinery.

Soft skills – such as workplace safety and communications – are not in the curriculum, nor have centres traditionally offered career placement services to help funnel their graduates into the industrial workforce.

According to the World Bank, just 40 per cent of ITI graduates in 2006 found jobs after completing their courses.

“Whether these boys got employment or not was of least concern to the ITI,” says B.P. Pant, director of the labour and skill development division of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

Now, though, industry is trying to act. Over the past three years, hundreds of Indian companies – ranging from Mafatlal Denim to Hero Honda, Tata Motors and Ispat Steel – have “adopted” government-run industrial training institutes to try to make them relevant to modern industry. “We have been virtually bullying these institutions, saying ‘your finished products are no use for us,’ so we thought we better try,” says Mr Pande of the VIA.

Under the rules of the government-established adoption programme – which it is touting as a model of “public-private partnership” – companies set up a management committee with representatives from industry, civil society and the government to assess their adopted institute’s overall condition, and regional employment opportunities. In theory, the industry-led committee has the power to make bold changes: hiring extra teachers, adding supplementary courses, acquiring new equipment, and setting up schemes to give students practical experience, while generating some revenues for the institute. Funds for upgrading 400 centres have come from a $280m (€220m, £180m) World Bank loan, while New Delhi has provided Rs26m ($550,000) for each of the rest.

“The central government has said, ‘We are giving you everything on a platter – every power is with you’,” says Namita Gautam, a director at the Sheela Group, which makes Sleepwell mattresses, and which has adopted a women’s vocational training institute in New Delhi. “You can practically do everything.”

In reality, however, corporate executives have quickly found that progress depends on the attitude of the training centre’s principals – most of whom are risk-averse career civil servants who still report to a sclerotic state bureaucracy.

Ms Gautam acknowledges that “there are teething problems”. At her training institute, for example, she has proposed letting hair and beauty students take commercial customers in their training salon, which would generate revenue to cover ongoing expenditure, such as hiring a technician to maintain the centre’s 100 computers. However, the idea has met with fierce resistance. “The principals are scared,” she says. “For them, commerce is a very dirty word.”

Proposals to dramatically change the syllabus of existing courses or change the menu of courses on offer at an institute to better reflect the local labour market require state approval. Yet the sluggishness of the government in responding to these ideas has already eroded many executives’ initial enthusiasm for the adoption scheme. “It’s like a spark, which fizzles out after some time,” says Sharad Verma, plant manager of Indo-Rama Synthetics, India’s second-largest manufacturer of polyester yarn.

His company adopted Nagpur’s 52-year-old industrial training institute nearly two years ago and involved executives from other local industries in working out a detailed modernisation plan. Since then, the committee has introduced supplementary courses on English and other soft skills, brought guest speakers from industry to talk about safety, quality and the environment and other workplace issues, and provided training for the institute’s existing teaching staff.

But Indo-Rama’s proposal to modernise the syllabus, to acquire new equipment, to introduce 12 new trades to the centre’s course list, and to increase student numbers in high-demand trades has been stuck in the government bureaucracy for more than a year.

Despite the hurdles, Vidharbha industrialists such as Mr Chawra are still confident they can bring change to the vocational training centre at Saoner, where recently more than 1,000 local youth were in a scrum, vying for one of the just 200 slots available for this year’s enrolment.

Although the institute’s principal and teachers were initially suspicious of corporate involvement in their fiefdoms, some are now quite cooperative after “motivational sessions” that have also included trips to local companies to give them more exposure to the actual workings of local industry. “We didn’t want them to feel that we are outsiders coming in with a stick to correct everything,” he says. “We have to work together.”

The new management committee now envisions turning Soener ITI into a centre for training welders, who are in desperately short supply as India struggles to improve its infrastructure, including its mobile phone network.

The industrialists also hope to expand the institute’s student enrolment to 500 a year, up from 200 now.

“It’s a slow process,” says Mr Chawra. “But we feel we are moving in the right direction, even if it’s not as fast as we want it to be.”