50 CRORE SKILLED INDIANS BY 2022. CAN IT HAPPEN ?

India's talent crunch is a familiar story. So is india's large army of the unemployed and the unemployable. What is new is an ambitious scheme to give both stories a shared fairytale ending by creating, the world's largest pool of skilled manpower- 50 crore skilled indians by 2022. That number would be larger than the population of either Europe or the US that year.

Indian industry has been trying to enlarge the available pool of skills, with both CII and FICCI, pitching in with varying degrees of vigour and efficacy. The Planning Commission came up with what it thought was a grand scheme, to set up 50,000 skilled development centres over the Eleventh Five Year Plan ( 2007-2012 ). The National Skill Development Council appointed by the prime minister, comprising experts like CK Prahalad, Nandan Nilekeni, and many other experts has come up with a new game-plan proposal to create, within a short period of time, no less than 2 lakh skill development centres by making use of the existing stock of public educational institutions above the high school as pyhsical infrastructure , private enterprise, bank credit, budgetary outlays and tax breaks, besides philanthropy.

The boldness of the scheme's ambition parallels that of the Golden Quadrilateral national highways project and the Pradhan Mantri Sadak Yojna announced by the previous NDA govt. When these schemes were launched, they looked like so much tall talk. Today multi-axeled trucks and tractors haul the roads, showcasing indian prosperity over these very real roads.

Now, we have to see, whether such a big masterplan prepared by the present govt, takes shape on the ground or it remains on the paper only. The key lies with honest govt. and honest bureacracy, on which the indian public has put a big question mark.