ISAS Working Papers

The policy debate on revamping and reforming education in India usually tends to focus on elementary and secondary education (delivered through schools) and higher education, with little being said on vocational education. This is not to suggest that the skills deficit is not recognised. While there are 12.8 million new entrants into the workforce every year, the existing annual training capacity is 3.1 million. The government has developed a roadmap for reform but not without several shortcomings. First, government ministries and departments work in silos. Second, much implementation of the roadmap will remain a state subject and there is no guarantee that delivery will improve across all states. Third, though the roadmap incorporates possible private sector provisioning too, it is fundamentally based on expansions in the formal public training system. While the formal versus informal or organised versus unorganised dichotomy is often policy-induced, it is necessary to subsume successful examples of delivery in the non-formal and private categories too. Fourth, much hinges on improving vocational education in secondary schools. Therefore, at the moment, there is no particular reason for optimism.