Youth need to be employed to boost productivity: Skills Secretary
skills development secretary Atul Kumar Tiwari said, adding that the onus lies on the government, industry and academia to take advantage of the situation.
«We have a window during which our working-age population is growing. During this time, there will be a situation, which comes once in a millennia, where India will have more young people than the old people,» Tiwari said on Wednesday while speaking at the Global Economic Policy Forum 2024.
«We will have a huge cohort of the young people who need to be employed so that we harness their energy and expertise to increase our productivity,» he said, adding this has made skilling and labour employment so important, bringing focus on creating human infrastructure rather than physical infrastructure. «It is a very, very challenging and epochal moment for India as a country.
The onus lies with the industry as well as academia and all of us working together, taking advantage of this demographic dividend,» he said.
Commenting on the upgradation of industrial training institutes (ITIs) scheme announced in the 2024-25 budget as part of the ₹2 lakh crore employment-linked incentive scheme, Tiwari said the ministry of skills development and entrepreneurship is working overnight to bring the industry, state governments and central government in three is to two is to one ratio, so that we create the aspirational level of skilling centres.
