Skill India ministry needs to find itself 1 office before it can help Indians find jobs

The ministry operates from 5 different premises, in different parts of Delhi and Noida, leading to a logistical nightmare for even simple tasks such as moving office files.

Representational image | Anindito Mukherjee | Bloomberg

New Delhi: When the Modi government launched its Skill India Mission amid much fanfare in 2015, it carved out a separate ministry to oversee the flagship scheme.

The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship was tasked with implementing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet project, the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), through which the government hoped to skill 40 crore youth by 2022. The flagship scheme was an effort to tackle unemployment and exploit the demographic dividend in the country.

The only hitch: The new ministry wasn’t allotted an office; it was to work from the premises in Central Delhi’s Shivaji Stadium.

Four years on, while the contours of the initiative have changed — in her maiden budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the government will now focus on new-age skills such as artificial intelligence to help youth get jobs overseas — the ministry is yet to move into a concrete office. The government has only now, in March 2019, laid the foundation for a building in New Delhi’s Chanakyapuri.

That has left it in an unenviable position — it now operates from five different premises, in different parts of Delhi and Noida, leading to a logistical nightmare for even simple tasks such as moving office files.

Officials at the ministry say that to even move a file, staff have to run from one building to another while the lack of cohesion hampers their working.

“How many years will be spent in constructing a new building?” asked one official on the condition of anonymity. “Till then we will be forced to unnecessarily move files from one place to another. On several occasions, even we do not know as to which official is posted at which address.”

Five offices in 2 cities

Of the five offices, two are in Central Delhi, one is in West Delhi, another is on the Delhi-Gurgaon border while the fourth is at Noida in Uttar Pradesh.

The current Minister of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship, Mahendra Nath Pandey, a former UP BJP president, and his junior, Minister of State R.K. Singh, sit in the Shram Shakti Bhavan, which also houses a host of other ministries such as the power ministry. The two ministers have the secretary and a couple of joint secretaries with them in the building located on Rafi Marg in Central Delhi.

However, a joint secretary and a host of directors and other staff of different wings sit in the PTI building, which is nearly a kilometre away on Parliament Street. It was at the PTI building that the ministry moved in, following its stint at the Shivaji Stadium, before it dispersed into different buildings.

Although the top bureaucrats are located fairly close to each other, the various agencies under the ministry are spread far and wide in the National Capital Region (NCR).

The skill ministry’s implementing agency, the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), is located at Aerocity, near the Delhi airport, which is nearly 15 km from the Shram Shakti Bhavan. Its policy-making body, the National Skill Development Agency, is housed at the Kaushal Bhavan in West Delhi’s Karol Bagh, which is about 6 kilometres from the Shram Bhavan. The ministry’s director-general, IAS officer Rajesh Aggarwal, sits in this office.

Another premier agency of the ministry, the National Institute for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Development (NIESBUD), which is tasked with training entrepreneurs, functions from the industrial area in Noida’s Sector 62. It is nearly 20 km from the Shram Shakti Bhavan.

No quick meeting

Officials say that the offices in different parts hamper their working in that they can’t even hold quick meetings. A source said that at times, an entire section of files has to go to different buildings for any clarification from a joint secretary or a secretary.

“The ministry has 15 to 20 cabs dedicated to moving officials from one building to the other one,” the official said. “Until and unless the ministry gets a building of its own, we will have to work like this.”