ABSTRACT
The separation of the ‘Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship’ (MSDE) from a severely truncated – at least in scope and ambit – ‘Ministry of Labour’ and the subsequent launching of the ‘Skill Mission’ in 2015 marks one of several critical moments in the wider historical narrative of skill development and skill formation in India. Occupational training officially now became regarded as a decisive element necessary to harness the much-celebrated and little-realized demographic dividend in India through greater degrees of market-oriented skilling of a young population. According to the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, this new regime of national skill training would not only be responsive to actual industry demands and requirements but also be delivered through a complex arrangement of both private and public institutions that maximized the reach and scope of the ‘Mission’. The current Indian national government’s emphasis on skill training to generate socioeconomic growth, employment and the production of a well-trained youth labour force is, while no doubt ambitious, not as unique or unprecedented as it is made out to be by the gushing contents of the MSDE’s official website. While skill preservation is frequently linked to questions of attrition within internal labour markets, in India – at many levels of the economy – it is more often linked to preserving skills within regionally established economic clusters, partially offsetting the need to counter attrition at the level of the firm.
