Govt commits to upskilling manpower in big way in manufacturing sector

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Monday that since most emerging jobs in the manufacturing sector will require definitive skill sets, the government has committed itself to encourage Industry 4.0 and to upskilling manpower in a big way.

The Minister said that situation in India couldn't be compared with that in other countries because of the fact that there was a question during a panel discussion on how lower end manufacturing jobs in India compared to those in Bangladesh and Vietnam.

In India the industry is looking at ways to expand capacity and how they could go about it. Most of them are looking at bringing in higher levels of technology, Industry 4.0, Web. She said that my conversations with the industry have shown that they are looking for highly skilled people for those jobs, and that they are not jobs that didn't exist earlier.

She said that since most of the jobs required definitive skill sets, the government had committed itself to encouraging Industry 4.0 and upskilling of manpower in a big way in the budget proposals for FY 24.

While the jobs are there, appropriate skill sets are not available for which we are rushing through to certify institutions that can train appropriately people to meet the requirements of the industry, Sitharaman said.

The minister denied that the private sector was holding itself back from investing in greenfield projects. She said investments made in areas as diverse as renewable energy, technologies such as chip manufacturing and electronics and the many success stories emerging since the roll out of the Production Linked Incentive PLI scheme were all pointing to the contrary.

We have gotten used to that in the old core industries and I include myself in that. They have a challenge before them before they can expand their capacities. For example, take steel. The minister stated that the industry can't expand capacity unless they're going to produce green steel.

The measure of quality was now green steel, which will face prohibitive non-tariff barriers.

The Indian industry will have to expand not only to produce more steel, but also expand to produce more and newer green steel! She made a statement.