Blog: Apprenticeships could address most of India’s skill development challenges
With the amendments to the Apprentices Act, 1961 having been completed, the journey for rejuvenating India’s outmoded apprenticeship regime has begun.
The regulatory challenge for apprenticeships
When the Apprentices Act was first conceptualized in 1961, the infant Indian industry was largely manufacturing based under a license-quota regime along with an insignificant service sector. In the initial couple of decades of independence, our industry lacked adequate maturity and hence a prescriptive regime for notification of apprenticeship quota and strict controls may have been crucial.
The original Act was conceived almost six decades ago whereas sweeping changes have taken place in the Indian economy since then. Despite significant growth in the manufacturing sector, the emergence of an even larger service sector and the introduction of several vocational and other relevant courses beyond Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs), India was stagnating with 200,000 to 300,000 apprentices annually. This is a very small proportion of the 10 million people annually who aspire to join our labour force of 510 million workers. As against that, Germany and China have three and 20 million apprentices respectively. Clearly, the scale of apprenticeship in India has been abysmal.
Indian industry had been pleading for an apprenticeship regime that is business-friendly with reduced governmental controls. A process of countrywide consultation with industry was carried out to understand the challenges associated with apprenticeships. This eventually led to the emergence of a consensus that a self-regulated regime would lead to a sharp increase in the number of apprentices voluntarily trained by industry. Reforms propelled by Indian industry coupled with a long-drawn advocacy process and inter-ministerial consultations eventually resulted into amendments to the Apprentices Act passed by Parliament in 2014.
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