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Monetary Reward in Skill Programmes
The Standard Training Assessment and Reward scheme was launched with the objective to benefit a million youth in a year, and introduced monetary reward to incentivise skill training. The scheme was relaunched in 2015 as Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana, and has an ambitious programme to skill 2.4 million youth a year. This article is an analysis of the evaluation of the scheme done by the National Skill Development Agency.
Skill development in India has been fostered by centralised efforts towards making them affordable and accessible to the vast population of youth across the country. Skill programmes have been running in India with more than 70 different schemes being run by the government alone through different central ministries. As government programmes, most of the courses under these schemes are being offered either completely free of cost or at a very minimum fee. Even the largest institutional structure of the formal vocational education system in India, the Industrial Training Institutes, has a highly subsidised fee structure. As the primary section beneficiaries under these programmes are those who have been left behind in the socio-economic parameters of welfare, having such a system addresses the question of affordability
To propagate wider access of skill programmes, the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE), through its Common Norms1 for Skill Development for all Government of India schemes, has mandatory provisions to incentivise training institutes that run their programmes in “Special Areas” that include north-eastern states, Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep and districts affected by Left Wing Extremism (LWE), as identified by the Ministry of Home Affairs for the Integrated Action Plan.