Union Government decided to transfer training and apprentice divisions to Skill Development Ministry

Union Government on 17 April 2015 decided to transfer training and apprentice divisions of the Directorate General of Employment and Training (DGET) from the Union Labour Ministry to Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.

The DGET comprises 12000 Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) across the country.  With this, the plan for setting up 25 new Advanced Training Institutes for skill development under the public-private partnership (PPP) mode will also come under the Skill Development Ministry.

This transfer has given a mandate to bring everything under the National Skills Qualification Framework, a national standard for all institutions, for all skill training across the country. This would amalgamate the certification process under the Ministry of Human Resource Development.

As a result of this decision, the Ministry will not only oversee the skill development activities of all ministries and departments, but actually implement schemes.

The Labour Ministry has a target of skill-training 100 million people by 2022, second only to the target for the National Skill Development Corp. (NSDC), which must train 150 million by the same period. The NSDC comes under the Skill Development Ministry.

According to data collated by the National Skill Development Agency (NSDA), part of the Skill Development Ministry, 21 departments and ministries were supposed to train 10.5 million people in 2014-15, but only 5.1 million people were trained.

Among the bigger ministries, the Ministry of Labour and Employment has done relatively better, achieving more than 89% of its 1.62 million-plus annual target.