Mohammad Khalid, a senior instructor with ITI Ferozepur Jhirka in Haryana, has spent about 30 years in the various industrial training institutes (ITIs) in the state. Based on his long experience, he says that the future of students passing out of his ITI and other ITIs is bright. The entire batch of students gets absorbed by the industry, the demand being high enough. There are instances where his ex-students have risen so high professionally to command
Rs 40,000 per month as salary. But he is not as happy about the availability of trainers, saying the ITI is facing tremendous shortage of trainers.
As the country is pinning its hopes on the skills development sector to solve the problem of poverty and unemployment, and at the same time is dreaming big of becoming the skills capital of the world, it better put its skills house in order. It is imperative to check whether the government and private institutes – ITIs – where lakhs of young people are trained in essential trades like electrician, plumber, mechanical trades, welding, mechanic motor vehicle etc, have the required infrastructure for training or not. One of the biggest concern areas, as seen above, is the availability of trainers.
There are 5,975 ITIs for craftsmen training in 110 designated trades, according to the Directorate General of Employment and Training (DGET) website. As high as 86 per cent of these are private (known as industrial training centres or ITCs) and the remaining are owned by the government.
As many as 50,569 units (each unit having 12 to 20 students), or nearly eight lakh students, are undergoing training in these institutes. The number of trainers required to cater to this student population is about 67,000 instructors. If we add the 1,500 new ITIs and 5,000 Skill Development Centres being planned, the demand for trainers shoots up phenomenally. A new brand of opportunities, especially in the service sector, are emerging which would require trainers of its own genre. As against this high demand, the provision for training of fresh manpower is abysmal – 1,100 trainers per year in its six instructor training institutes run by DGET.
It’s not just about money
Interestingly, fund availability is not alone to blame for acute shortage of trainers. Trained manpower simply doesn’t want to come to training sector, feel the people at senior echelon in this field. World over, there is an acute shortage of teachers, trainers and instructors across the spectrum, feels SJ Amalan, Director, Apex Hitech Institute (AHI), Bangalore, and Regional Director of Apprenticeship Training. He says that by and large over history the job of an instructor– like teachers and professors – has been the last choice of an individual. If a person doesn’t get any other job then he becomes a teacher. He draws a parallel between vocational education and management education, where the salary of a fresh pass-out from a B-school is more than that of his teacher.
Is a vocational trainer’s salary not attractive enough then? That is the point that Suresh Babu, (formerly Training & Development Manager, BOSCH, Bangalore), raises, when he says that vocational trainers are not encouraged, in terms of emoluments.
Amalan, however, says trainers in government institutes are well-remunerated in terms of structured salary, pension and stability of job. The private institutes are the ones badly hit ones because they are dealing with a lot of migration, and attrition, on account of low salaries. He, however, adds that some established companies like BOSCH and TATA, which run training centres, pay the same salaries to trainers as they pay to production personnel.
Still, on the whole the differential between the salaries of trainers and industry payments is large and therefore people who are good, shift to industry, says Arindam Lahiri, Director, Career Launcher and Chairman of IMCs in Haryana. He says availability of trainers is inversely proportionate to industry opportunities. In trades like plumbing and carpentry, where jobs exist more in the unorganised sector, you will find easier availability of qualified trainers.
To add to the difficulty is the geographical location of an ITI. Lahiri points out the difficulty the IMC faces in getting good trainers, because people from other regions are not interested in coming over to that village, and getting trained people from within the village or nearby for a particular trade with required qualifications is very difficult.
As if the availability of trainers is not an issue enough, the Government squeeze on recruitment acts as a further impediment. Shashikant Shama, Assistant Director of training, Rajasthan, who has been principal of various ITIs in the state, says that because of this squeeze, a large number of posts are lying vacant in Rajasthan alone. Incidentally Rajasthan has the largest number of ITIs (357) in the northern region. Funds are not the crux of the matter, as Babu says. “It’s not that the government lacks funds. The infrastructure is there. The problem is that there is no proper planning as to how the infrastructure should be used. Our priorities are not directly relevant to the training. More time is spent on administration.”
It’s about upgradation too
Unfortunately, the problem doesn’t stop there. Even the trainers that are available are perhaps not abreast of the latest in the industry. Technological changes are taking place at break neck speed, whereas the trainers are getting updated at snails speed. Amalan says, “Training of instructors is not motivational. If a man is appointed in the government he doesn’t need to upgrade his skills to remain in the government. He is not going to be thrown out.” Lahiri echoes the same sentiment, when he says, “There has to be performance-based compensation. If a good trainer joins, shows the motivation and upgrades himself, he gets the same salary as the trainer who doesn’t. And since the government doesn’t follow performance-based compensation structure, it impacts the salary structure in the private sector too.”
According to Shivender Doegar, Principal, ITI Solan, Himachal Pradesh, which runs 23 regular courses and 92 MES courses, there is a practical problem attached to training.
He admits that while all the trades need latest knowhow of machines, if the trainers go for training the classes suffer. “So, if we take mechanical trade, we need one extra post, so that in case a person goes for training, the classes don’t suffer. We can’t ask an electrical trainer to take mechanical classes in that case. At best what we do is to ask the maintenance mechanic to take classes”. No doubt, NCVT in its 37th meeting held on October 23, 2008, approved the proposal to appoint 20 per cent instructors in ITIs / ITCs in excess of the prescribed number, but its implementation seems bleak in the face of existing shortfall of minimum required number.
Doegar continues: “What we are doing is tying up with industry for training, for which they go for a short duration of, say, three days. But what’s needed is complete knowledge, and three days is a very short period. The teachers are old and they hesitate to update themselves”.
“One option is training on campus. We are in dialogue with CRISP Bhopal to impart the training in Solan itself, as the training is of 15-20 days.
“The other option is that we send the trainers for training when students go for in-plant training. But the problem is that the national-level institutes have their own training calendar, which often do not match with the training schedules of students in the industry. We are dependent on the industry to give us time.”
Fortunately, in spite of the manpower shortages, ITI Solan is running not just the regular 23 courses, but in the evenings and on weekends also runs MES courses, taking the total student strength to about 1,500.
Solutions in sight
Just as the problem of availability of quality trainers has many dimensions, the solutions proposed also point at a diversity of approach. While ITIs, faced with the crunch and left to solve the problem on their own take recourse to measures like sharing of faculty between two batches and hiring of ad hoc trainers, the solutions suggested above can solve the problem of trainer shortage only partially.
As Amalan tells, in the private sector there are institutions which are run as grant-in-aid where the salaries are paid either full or partially by the government. In Karnataka they pay full salaries of all the instructors but they have got a clause that seven years after running the institution is when they become eligible to be a grant-in-aid institution. That’s one way the state governments are lending their helping hand to the private sector.
Can the private sector entering the IMCs of ITIs, bring in its expertise for training purpose? While Amalan feels that the model can be worked upon, provided the private sector puts its heart and soul into it, Lahiri is not convinced. He says that a company, say a tractor manufacturer, entering an ITI can bring in the expertise pertaining to its product, whereas an ITI offers many trades. A better way would be to involve the industry body of a particular region to take up the ITI’s in a given region.
The need is also to train and certify trainers as per industry standards. Apex Hitech Institute in Bangalore is now DGET’s nodal institute for planning, executing and administering instructor training in the country, utilising not only the facilities available at DGET’s field institutes but also other reputed institutes and centres like BOSCH, NTTF, GTTC, IGTR, CRISP, etc Amalan informs: “We have plans to train 500 COE Advance Module Instructors a year, reaching out to 2,500 in a span of five years. This will cover the instructors required for advanced modules of Centres of Excellence (COE) scheme being implemented in selected ITI’s. During the year 2008-09, nearly 250 instructors have already completed training and the figure is expected to reach planned 500 by end of March 2009. Adequate funds have been provided by Govt for this purpose”. In addition, AHI is mandated to plan and execute the training of ITI instructors in other schemes also, to take care of the overall competency of vocational training in the country in a phased manner.
NCVT in its meeting also considered the proposal to create instructor training wings in some of the well performing ITI’s in the country in the hope of augmenting the present instructor training capacity.
The issue of instructor training being big and complicated needs putting in place multiple solutions. The time is now and here to act and create a pool of trained instructors to meet the challenges which are knocking at our door.
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