Integrated Skill Development Scheme (ISDS)

An Overview

Indian Textile Industry occupies a unique position in the national economy owning to its high employability and diversity of skill sets required in the wide range of segments, ranging from products of traditional handloom, handicrafts, wool, silk products to the organized textile industry comprising of spinning, weaving, processing, apparel and garment characterized by usage of capital intensive technology for mass production of textile products. The textiles sector has the second largest employment after agriculture sector and occupies an important position in the Indian economy. It also contributes 14% to industrial production, 4% to India’s GDP and constitutes to 13% of country’s export earning, with over 45 million people employed directly.

Scheme Background

• As per the NSDC report, the overall employment in the textile and clothing sector expected to increase from about 33 to 35 million in 2008 to about 60 to 62 million by 2022.
• This would translate to an incremental humanresource requirement of about 25 million persons by 2022.
• Of this, the mainstream textile and clothing sector has the potential to employ about 17 million persons incrementally till 2022.

With a view to address the manpower requirement of the diverse textile and related segments, the Ministry of Textiles introduced pilot phase of Integrated Skilled Development Scheme (ISDS) in the last two years of the 11th Five Year Plan Year 2010-11. Subsequently, the scheme has been scaled up during the 12th plan with a target of skilling 15 lakhs persons by the end of March 2017.

The government provides a grant subsidy to the extent of 75% of product cost with a ceiling of Rs. 10,000/- per trainee. The Scheme is being implemented by leveraging existing institutional strength and training experience through three components.

• Component I – Institutions/TRAs under MoT
• Component II – Private Industry Partners in PPP mode
• Component III – State Government Agencies

As of now a total of 11.3 lakh training targets has been sanctioned under 76 projects to around 58 implementing agencies spread across all over India. Variety of shareholders like Textile research associations, private training partners, industry associations, State Government institutions are working in cooperation and coordination under the ambit of the Ministry of Textiles for fulfilling the skilling requirement of the textile and related sector.

The scheme has experienced significant progress over the last 5 years and around 4.20 lakhs candidates has been successfully trained across diverse sectors like Apparel and Garments, Textiles, Handlooms, Handcrafts, sericulture, technical textiles, Jutes etc. During the year 2010, around 6 projects were sanctioned under the scheme which has increased progressively to 57 in the year 2014 and 76 in the year 2015-16.

Mid-term modification of scheme guidelines

In terms of the broad skill policy framework of the Government and ‘Make in India’ initiatives, the scheme has been revamped in FY 2014-15 with a view to simplify the procedure and to focus on partnering with industry for scaling up of implementation of training programme with assured employment. Given the vide spectrum and range of activities, the scheme provides enough scope for flexibility to ensure that a gamut of need-based skill development options received under the scheme. Following are the major modification introduced in the scheme guidelines to make it more outcome oriented.

• Preference to be given for skill development in organized textiles industry as Apparel & Garmenting, Technical Textiles, Weaving and Spinning for making a non-worker a worker.
• Placement with a reasonable salary has been made a major yardstick of the scheme. All implementing agencies to place 70% trainees in wage employment with minimum wage prescribed for his/her skill category.
• Trainees for ISDS may be selected from jobseekers amongst the rural youth, having educational qualification preferably below 10+2 standard information with employment exchanges may be leveraged for identification of trainees.
• The training program across the scheme has to follow MIS discipline without any exception. MIS data is the only source for training under ISDS. Payment to IAs shall be processed based on system generated reports.
• A web enabled certification system is to be introduced, where IAs can download system generated certificates as soon as assessment agencies input their data in MS.

Scheme Reach

The scheme has a wide spread reach with training being conducted in almost all Indian States/ UTs etc. Around 3,250 training centers are present across different Indian States, cities and rural areas including remote location, backwards region, left wing extremist affected area etc. Out of the total 664 districts Indian districts, around 357 districts have been covered under the scheme and trainees from different strata of the society are the major beneficiaries.

ISDS: PAN India Presence

Under ISDS scheme, special emphasis has been laid on selecting the trainees from the job seekers amongst the rural youth having educational qualification preferably 10+2 standard. Key focus has been given to target weaker/underprivileged sections of the society for the upliftment of their economic status and to provide opportunities for livelihood. The scheme reach has been highly inclusive and major stress has been laid on targeting backward section and reaching the lowest stratum of the society. Out of the total successful trainees trained till July 2015, around55% of the trainees belongs to backward section including the SC/ST/OBC/Minority. Furthermajority of the candidates trained under the scheme are women.