Towards Skill Development

Skill development has been a major policy agenda of the Indian government in the past few years. This paper sheds light on the current scenario and labour market outcomes of vocationally trained population using two recent rounds of employment and unemployment survey of the National Sample Survey Organisation. The paper shows that 2.4% of the population had vocational education and training in year 2004-05 and this share has further declined to less than 2% in year 2009-10, in the age bracket 15-29 years. Though, unemployment rate of this group has declined by two percentage points between the years, nevertheless, the extent of the rate has remained very high. Further, we compare formal and non-formal trainees and find that unemployment rate for the latter group is much lower but they are mainly self-employed workers or casual labourers