Twenty-year-old Ganesh Kande from Tamaswade village in Maharashtra’s Nashik district, travels about 30 kilometres everyday in a bus to Sinnar taluka, with dreams of making it to Mumbai one day. He dreams of landing himself a job as a store manager in an upscale mall in Mumbai.

Kande is currently undergoing a free training at Ideal Computers, a certified skill development centre that gets funding from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikash Yojana (PMKVY). The scheme aims to provide employment to about one crore youth in the age bracket of 18-35, by 2020. Kande says he will be the first in his family to work in a city. “I am not interested in working in sugarcane fields. I want to go to the city,” Kande said.

Ground report But not everyone is as sincere as Kande, says Kailah Mhaske, the Centre Head and owner of Ideal Computers, which provides courses on retail, CAD design, and jewellery design. “Many students do not want to take up jobs. They just don’t want to leave the village and go out. The government is doing a great job of providing free training, but it should come out with some relevant courses, keeping in mind the industries, so the students can get a job near their village,” Mhaske said.

Students from his centre have landed jobs with an initial pay package in the range of ₹5,000-₹10,000. “This kind of package is not lucrative enough for them to move out,” he added.

The Government gives funding based on the number of students who have passed. According to Mhaske, last year, about 1,000 out of 1,100 students cleared the exam, so the Government paid only for 1,000 students. “Many didn’t sit for the exams because of various reasons. Also, about 70 per cent of students in non-technical courses are girls and many a times, they get married before the course is completed. I would request the Government to make full payment if the pass percentage is 80 per cent,” he said.

The Government has allotted ₹12,000 crore for the PMKVY, which will be disbursed to about 1,100 centres, as of January 15.

However, despite a few challenges, Mhaske feels that PMKVY is a better version of Modular Employment Scheme (MES) under the UPA regime. He says PMKVY-2 for 2016-17 was stricter with more quality control checks. The Government has improvised rules to ensure that there are no leakages of funds, and there is no scope for fraud or cheating.

IL&FS Skill Development, a for-profit company that runs several skill development centres across the country, said, “Currently, skill development programmes are not aspirational and are not a preferred career choice.” As part of placement, students sometimes need to migrate to other cities for employment, which is not very lucrative.

The other side But overall, most centres BusinessLine spoke to, said the scheme is working well. “PMKVY has brought in lot of regulation and processes in place,” said Santosh Kumar, Branch Head at SmartBrains in Pune-Satara road that provides technical courses .

“The main agenda is to not provide jobs but to promote entrepreneurship. At the end of the course (that spans over three months), every student is given a certificate and a chip-based skill card.”

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