What Should We Do With a Budget of Rs25000 Crores

No I have not won a lottery. This just happens to be the budget of the newly formed Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Ministry. Getting a budget and a leader to execute the budget in most cases is a good starting point for most projects. This problem is different. Before the Ministry can get going it needs to untangle a mesh of ministries and departments each one with a different army of people and budgets working often at cross purposes.The National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) is a poverty alleviation project implemented by Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India. This scheme is focused on promoting self-employment and organization of rural poor. If they need to be given vocational training, then that would need to be addressed by the Director General of Employment and Training which is part of Ministry of Labour which is also responsible for apprenticeship schemes. But it is the Ministry of Finance that is running the National Skill Development Agency whose mandate was to create 500 million skilled people by 2022. Let us not miss the Ministry of Mines Steel Labour and Employment. My recommendation, merge the budgets and craft one single measure. Let us create a workforce that has the skills that will be needed in future.There is a HRD Ministry that is aimed at higher education, distance learning, open education and the like. They control a budget of Rs22000 crores. The Skill Development and Entrepreneurship minister will have a purse of another Rs25000 crores. Imagine what we could do with Rs47000 crores to build the skills of the youth. Today that all gets intertwined like a plate of noodles where it is hard to pick up one single strand. That makes accountability fuzzy and it also makes it hard to be agile and implement ideas with speed.If India has to leverage its demographic dividend, we need to craft a multi-disciplinary view of what makes a person employable. We need to leverage technology to give schools and colleges access to the resources that are freely available on the net. The famous hole-in-the-wall experiment (read about it here <click this>) has shown that if you give children access to technology they will teach themselves. For that we do not need to set up a new Ministry of Unconventional Learning.Twelve million people enter the workforce every year. They need skills and proficiency in those skills that create careers. No, I do not recommend setting up a Ministry of Career Development. The agenda is very complex since it involves education, training, apprenticeship, scholarships and all that comes in between.Look at the world for which we are skilling our children and youth. Machines will quietly replace jobs that require low level skills. The labor market will also be one where the top talent will get disproportionate pay while the others will experience shrinking of money and opportunities. There is no point running away from this reality. Robotic automation software corresponds to an emerging trend for technology to replace the functions performed by humans, particularly in the service sector. Time is running out.We have the problem of plenty. Look at what is happening in business schools. Nearly 300,000 students take the Common Admissions Test and other entrance tests every year. The number of MBA seats in India has grown almost four-fold from 94,704 in 2006-07 to 3,52,571 in 2011-12, resulting in a 5-year compounded annual growth rate of 30 percent. More than 3,500 B-schools offer nearly 2,75,000 seats for admission to an MBA program. Only 21 percent of MBAs were found to be employable in the latest MeritTrac-MBAUniverse.com report. Just 5 years back, the percentage of employable MBAs was estimated to be 25 percent. The focus cannot be on creating more educational franchises. It has to be about creating the workforce of the future.That may involve creating a Ministry of Dreams – so be it.----------Join me on Twitter @AbhijitBhaduri