In a classroom of construction firm Larsen & Toubro’s training center outside Mumbai, an instructor lifts up a tool and shows it to his students: “Clawhandle,” he tells them.
“Clawhandle,” chant back the young men, gathered under a picture of Vishwakarma, the Hindu god for craftsmen.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is depending on such young people to realize his dream of turning India from a country of IT professionals, security guards and low-paid chauffeurs into a manufacturing and export powerhouse through his “Make in India” initiative.
Photo: Reuters
India has too few skilled laborers after decades of neglect in training and it desperately needs electricians, bricklayers and plumbers.
The shortage means India could squander the potential demographic dividend of 12 million people joining the labor market per year, just when China’s workforce is expected to lose 6 million over the next decade because of its aging population.
“India, so far, has been a country that celebrated knowledge and intellect. Skills are not celebrated,” said Rituparna Chakraborty, president of Indian Staffing Federation, which represents the country’s employment agencies.
China became a manufacturing giant by steering secondary school students into formal skilled training programs.
By contrast, in India, students who do not go on to tertiary education have few vocational options other than government-run Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) that executives say are poorly managed and often outdated.
For example, the ITI syllabus for car mechanics includes considerable training on carburetors, which were widely phased out of cars in the 1990s.
The scant training available means that India has only 3.5 million workers undergoing skills courses each year, compared with 90 million in China, according to Indian government data.
The lack of proper training is compounded by prejudice against manual labor under the Hindu caste system, which has traditionally left jobs that might get your hands dirty to the lowest of the low.
As a result, only one in 10 workers in India’s construction industry are skilled, according to government data.
The government has a goal to provide at least some skills to 500 million people by 2022. However, private companies such as the Godrej Group are taking matters into their own hands, recruiting and training workers themselves to be ready with skilled labor when an economic recovery comes.
“I always say that there is no unemployment in India. It’s only unemployability,” said Adi Godrej, whose businesses range from consumer goods to real estate and infrastructure.
Larsen & Toubro, the country’s biggest construction company, says it could face a labor shortage next year, just when it plans to ramp up investment after two years of slow economic growth.
It has gone out to rural areas to find recruits and bring them to sprawling training centers — such as the one in the outskirts of Mumbai, where young men practice bricklaying and putting up scaffolding — from which up to 20,000 students graduate a year, many of them joining Larsen & Toubro.
Yogesh Devdas Dudhpachari, 24, is one of the company’s recruits. An unskilled motorcycle mechanic, he attended an ITI to learn carpentry, but ended up back at his village without a job before being taken on by the firm.
“Skill and time is valued here,” he said during a break in his training. “We were not doing anything in our villages.”
Modi has vowed to make skills training a major plank of his “Make in India” initiative, passing through parliament a program that will make it easier for employers to hire apprentices for two years.
“The initiatives are in the right direction,” Morgan Stanley Asia-Pacific chief economist Chetan Ahya said. “However, alongside focusing on the quantitative aspect of skilled labor force, the policymakers will also need to focus on the qualitative aspect of the skill programs.”
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