Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday announced the allocation of Rs 3,000 crore for the Skill India programme during her Budget 2020 speech.
“There exists a huge demand abroad for teachers, paramedical staff and caregivers. But their skills do not match the required ones by employers. My government proposes Rs 3000 crore for skill development,” she said.
“There is a shortage of qualified medical doctors both general practitioners and specialists; it is proposed to attach a medical college to a district hospital in PPP mode; details of the scheme to be worked out soon. Rs 99,300 crore allocated for the education sector,” she said.
The finance minister said entrepreneurship has always been the strength of India and to boost job creations, and skill development, the government is looking at creating five new smart cities in the country.
“Investment clearance cell to be set up for entrepreneurs. Individuals will be offered assistance in funding as well and a portal will be set up for this purpose. Efforts to step up entrepreneurship, amid a growing realisation that the Start-up India and other handholding schemes have not taken off as intended,” she said.
The Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) is one of the flagship programmes of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government and was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 15, 2015.
After training over 1.9 million candidates in 375 job roles in the first year, the Union Cabinet extended the scheme for another four years (2016-2020) to impart skills to 10 million young people in the country with an outlay of Rs 12,000 crore.
A parliamentary panel report had said the Union skill development ministry has not spent its entire budget for the last three years and a key scheme to train people has achieved just 49% of its training target.
According to the report of the standing committee on labour, the Centrally Sponsored Centrally Managed (CSCM) component of the PMKVY “had a target to train 11,076,167 people, but only 5,761,570 could be enrolled out of which 5,446,975 could be trained.”
Out of the roughly 5.5 million trained, only 4.2 million were satisfied and finally, 1.3 million got jobs till July 2019, the report added.
