The Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) system was always a pressing need, even at the best of times, for meeting the requirements of skilled manpower for India’s economy and for achieving the aim of inclusive and equitable growth.
UNESCO’s recently released State of the Education Report for India 2020: Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is titled ‘Vocational Education First’ for several very good reasons. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 heralds the potentially explosive growth of vocational education in the country since it requires all educational institutions to integrate vocational education into their offerings. This will bring in a very large number of schools, colleges and universities — a little over 280,000 secondary and higher secondary schools and more than 40,000 higher education institutions — into the fold of potential TVET providers during the coming decade, making TVET available to millions of students. The report provides an overview of the state of TVET education in the country today and describes the challenges facing educational institutions in fulfilling the mandate of the NEP while also making several suggestions and recommendations for the way forward.
Given that India’s population is very youthful, with 64 percent of the population in the working age group of 15-59 years, a high-quality, high-throughput, TVET system was always a pressing need, even at the best of times, for meeting the requirements of skilled manpower for India’s economy and for achieving the aim of inclusive and equitable growth. As Eric Falt, Director, UNESCO New Delhi, observes: “The COVID-19 pandemic has stressed healthcare infrastructure, labour markets and employment to a degree never seen before. In a sense, this has exposed not only the major fault lines in the vocational education and training systems but also their raison d’etre. Skills are increasingly becoming the global currency of 21st-century economies.”
India has made enormous strides in the provision of TVET and the report describes the extensive infrastructure that has been set up for offering short-term training courses during the past decade. The main vehicle has been the National Skill Development Corporation set up in 2008, and its ecosystem of Training Providers and Sector Skills Councils. However, as the report points out, these courses cater largely only to demand from industry for training and placement of youth in specialised, narrowly defined, entry level jobs. Longer-term training courses that are being offered through the ITIs and the polytechnics, the latter having existed since before independence, have grown much more slowly relative to the large capacity for short-term courses that has been created in just over a decade. Schools have also been engaged in the provision of vocational education at the higher secondary level since the early 1990s but the number of students being reached so far is still well below 10 percent of the cohort.
The foremost challenge that educational institutions will need to overcome, for the successful implementation of the NEP, is the mindset prevalent today among key stakeholders such as students and parents, that TVET is inferior to regular school and college education and suitable only for those youth who are unable to cope with mainstream education. Schools have not succeeded in overcoming this stigma during the past three decades for several reasons, including the fact that pathways into higher education were not created for students of vocational education. Management and teachers at schools and colleges will also need to overcome their lack of knowhow with regard to the provision of vocational education and embrace the task of integration with enthusiasm and commitment.
Other challenges to skill development described in the report include the need to provide inclusive access to TVET, particularly for women; the need to overcome the large digital divide and the need to create adequate opportunities for upskilling, reskilling, and lifelong learning, particularly in new and strategic areas such as Industry 4.0 and greening. The report also highlights the need to focus on preserving and promoting India’s vast reserves of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, an activity that has the potential to create livelihoods for large numbers of its citizens while also instilling a sense of pride and ownership among its youth.
Education is at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and is essential for the success of all the Sustainable Development Goals. The renewed education agenda encapsulated in Goal 4 on ‘Quality Education’ along with its seven targets — four of which are related to TVET — is inspired by a vision of education that transforms the lives of individuals, communities and societies, leaving no one behind, and is guided by the concept of lifelong learning. The NEP embraces the Education 2030 Agenda completely and commits to expanding TVET considerably to enable social justice and livelihoods through providing quality lifelong learning opportunities for all.
The report makes the following ten key recommendations that can help to achieve the stated vision for TVET:
• Place learners and their aspirations at the centre of vocational education and training programmes.
• Create an appropriate ecosystem for teachers, trainers and assessors.
• Focus on upskilling, re-skilling and lifelong learning.
• Ensure inclusive access to TVET for women, differently abled persons and other disadvantaged learners.
• Massively expand the digitalisation of vocational education and training.
• Support local communities to generate livelihoods by engaging in the preservation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage.
• Align better with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
• Deploy innovative models of financing TVET.
• Expand evidence-based research for better planning and monitoring.
• Establish a robust coordinating mechanism for inter-ministerial cooperation.
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Leena Chandran Wadia was Senior Fellow at ORFs Mumbai Centre. She has been leading the Mumbai Centres research and policy advocacy in education since 2010.
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