ABSTRACT
India's demographic advantage brings great hope to the global industries of scale that demand high-end research facilities and quality education/training aligned to future industry needs. The workforce in India is projected to increase by 27% to reach approximately 600 million by 2022, but current statistics report that the employability of the workforce is abysmally low. Even though numerous initiatives have already been taken, there lies great scope for improvement in order to achieve quality education and sustainable employment for all. With almost all economic and non-economic transactions turning digital, the ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution pacing on to the Fifth and the COVID-19 pandemic changing the overall job scenario, future challenges are likely to become grimmer. In order to combat the disruptions caused by the shocks from the past, it becomes extremely important that the convergence between higher education and the skill ecosystem is tightened. Highly educated and super-specialised human resources to forge new innovations in production technologies is the need of the future. The same is supported by governmentpolicy to turn India into a ‘Knowledge Superpower’ with an emphasis on technology-led innovation, entrepreneurship, research and development. The national approach to preparing the future workforce is of a multipronged nature to take advantage of ‘spin off’ as well as ‘ignition effect’. Given the extent of socio-cultural, economic and geographical diversities in India, it is imperative that these more inclusive and affordable. This chapter highlights the skill development ecosystem in India as being disjointed, uncoordinated, overlapping, non-continuous and traces the shift in focus of education towards work-based employability skills training. A judicious mix of skilled workforce for the manufacturing sector as well as for the ambitious hi-tech services sector is going to be a challenging task.
