Around the world, countries with an impressive record of economic growth are also some of the most skilled countries. Common to these countries is the adoption of a holistic approach towards skilling its population. This includes integrating vocational education into mainstream education, greater involvement of industries in skilling and a clear roadmap for students to make the move from school towards a career. With the launch of Skill India campaign in 2015, India took the first step towards creating an ecosystem to develop a skilled workforce. The campaign has an ambitious target of skilling over 40 crore people by 2020.

As part of the Saksham Haryana–Skills and Employment engagement, Samagra is working on four elements of the skilling ecosystem.

• Creating linkages between the youth and employment opportunities
• Systemic transformation of all Industrial Training Institutes
• Quality implementation of all short-term skilling courses
• Creating academic and career pathways for skilled youth

The vision of Saksham Haryana involves the transformation of the complete lifecycle of a student in the state, right from the time he/she starts school, goes through the various stages of education (school, college, post-graduation) and enters the workforce. While the Saksham Haryana-Education team works on the stages related to education, the Skills and Employment team work on the post-school stages of the life cycle.

Understanding unemployment

Frictional unemployment occurs in an economy when people are moving from one job to another or there is information asymmetry between job seekers and employers. It is one of the easier unemployment challenges to solve and can be through a demand-focussed approach. In such a scenario, the first question to answer is: where do the jobs exist. The next step would be finding job seekers for those jobs.

To tackle this challenge and link the youth of Haryana to both public and private sector employment opportunities, our team supported the state government in designing multiple initiatives.

Public sector recruitment

The Haryana Staff Selection Commission (HSSC) is an independent body that recruits people for government jobs such as teachers, drivers, computer operators, back office assistants, peons, constables etc. The Government of Haryana has over 4 lakh sanctioned posts across all its departments, public sector undertakings, boards, corporations etc. A transparent and efficient recruitment mechanism is therefore critical to providing employment to lakhs of people. Unfortunately, HSSC is held back from achieving its intended objective due to several systemic issues. They range from the policy framework, financial powers to inefficient processes and HR management. The Government of Haryana is working on the holistic transformation of the Commission by using technology, creating enabling policy structures and building the capacity of the staff. Technology solutions have been developed for online requisitions (request from the state government to HSSC to recruit for certain positions), Management and Information Systems for all ongoing recruitments and court cases etc., have helped in creating a visibility across the leadership in Haryana. Various policy decisions such as scrapping of interviews for recruitment of Group C and Group D posts, empanelment of lawyers to fight court cases on behalf of HSSC etc., have enabled smoother functioning of the Commission. In just six months, we were able to support the Commission in recruiting more than twice the number of people they recruited annually in the last decade.

Private sector recruitment

In recent years, India has seen the emergence of several aggregators such as Ola, Uber, G4S, Urban Clap. An aggregator is essentially connecting a service provider (cab drivers in the case of Ola/Uber) to the customer. One of the biggest costs for aggregators is finding these service providers/entrepreneurs at scale. On the other hand, collating this information and mobilizing people is one of the easiest tasks. To create a win-win partnership, we facilitated non-commercial agreements between the aggregators and the state government. As part of the agreement, the government organizes job fairs to mobilize youth, shares targeted databases of unemployed people and graduates from government education institutes. On their part, Ola and Uber have committed to phased expansion in the state by employing the youth of the state.  Since July 2018, nearly 30,000 youth have been onboarded by Ola and Uber in Haryana.

Also Read: How Haryana is working with cab aggregators to solve the unemployment puzzle

We are also working with the state government to bring in successful innovations from across the country to solve the linkage issue of unemployment. For instance, assessment organizations such as Aspiring Minds, Co-Cubes etc., utilize their online platforms to assess students and link them with relevant jobs across different sectors. The Government of Haryana will soon onboard one such organization to set up placement platforms across government colleges in the state to provide its final year students with well-suited employment opportunities. Since the assessments would provide insights into the skills the student has, the government will also bridge the skill gap students face through various mechanisms. Two more best practices that have been incorporated from other states include organizing mega job fairs, which have been successful in Punjab and Delhi,  and professionally run employment exchanges yet another that has seen success in Gurugram and Karnataka. Both of these have been adopted as part of Saksham Haryana.

Apprenticeship

Apart from the initiatives detailed above, we are also increasing employment opportunities for the  youth of Haryana through apprenticeships. The Apprenticeship Act of 1961, strengthened through the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS) provides a robust structure to provide apprenticeship opportunities to all students, and ITI graduates, in particular (as part of NAPS). Building upon this, the Government of Haryana has taken several steps to drive the implementation of the Act. By involving Deputy Commissioners (District Collectors in some states), setting recruitment targets for each government entity at the district level, consistently reviewing and monitoring implementation and incentivizing private sector participation through non-commercial means has made Haryana the top-ranked state in the country in terms of apprentices per lakh population. The state government has also been approached by other states for knowledge sharing on this front.

Through the Saksham Haryana programme, the Government of Haryana is keen on making the state a national leader in managing and strengthening human capital through quality education and skilling and employment opportunities fo