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.