New Delhi: Business leaders tasked with modernizing the country’s state-run Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) through public-private partnerships (PPP) are discovering that old government habits die hard—and change is harder to induce.
Ask Satish Chandra Agarwal. More than two years ago, the chairman of the Rs88 crore PTC Industries Ltd, a fabrication and forging company with factories in Haryana and Gujarat, accepted the offer to overhaul the ITI in Lucknow and equip students, mostly 10th class dropouts, with skills the industry needs.
It’s one of the 1,396 ITIs the government plans to revamp through the PPP route to meet the needs of industry for skilled labour.
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Agarwal joined as chairman of what is known as the Institute Management Committee (IMC), a tripartite panel of state officials, industry partners and principal of the local institute, in March 2007.
But more than two years on, Agarwal is a frustrated man. He says it took more than a year for the panel to decide whether the institute should focus on one specialized field —refrigeration—or whether to upgrade existing training courses.
The curriculum, more theory-oriented than practical, was not easy to change without state and Central approvals that took a long time coming.
“The last nail in the coffin,” Agarwal said, was when trade union members of the college stomped into a room to demand an explanation on how he called a meeting without informing them. He resigned last month as chairman.
ITIs, established under the ministry of labour, train students as electricians, plumbers, air conditioning and refrigeration mechanics and in other trades in a country where lack of sufficient skilled labour and a burgeoning, young working-age population has been a source of mounting concern for the government.
According to the 2007-2008 Economic Survey, about 64.8% of the country’s population would be in the working age of 15-64 by 2026. A separate study conducted by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and consultancy Boston Consulting Group says that India will have a net additional workforce of 89 million between 2007 and 2012, of which 57 million are likely to be school dropouts.
The government is providing a Rs2.5 crore, interest-free, long-term loan to each ITI and about 600 of them have signed in-principle agreements with industrial partners since April 2007. A total of Rs1,500 crore has been disbursed to the 600 institutes, but so far, less than Rs44 crore of the money has been spent.
The new management of the institutes, although empowered to take financial decisions to buy equipment or carry out renovation work independently, find they often can’t proceed without clearances from the state government.
While the current skill development programme can support the training of 3.1 million people, the government has set an ambitious target of training as many as 500 million by 2022.