Manufacturing and Education: The Missing Links

Background/Objectives: The Make-In-India policy is a takeoff on the National Manufacturing Policy (NMP) (2011) which seeks to bolster India's manufacturing and employment substantially. There is also a distinct shift from public sector dominance to Public Private Partnership (PPP) architecture and creating the right environment for private sector to flourish. However, a new education policy in sync with such manufacturing strategy is long awaited.

Methods/Statistical analysis: This paper seeks to highlight the different dimension of the missing links between the two policies. It has extensively depended on official sources to bring out appropriate tabular statements to bring out the trend analysis of various sectors in terms of employment, value addition and share in GDP. It has also analyzed major reports and findings in the education sector and cross verified the data through field study by adapting statistical sample study method.

Findings: The major findings are: inadequacy in budget allocation to different segments of education, serious short falls in terms of outcomes in primary education, research and patents registered by the universities and laboratories and significant gaps in skill availability to meet the opportunity in the pipeline. The stagnancy in the contribution of manufacturing sector in GDP share and employment generation has been brought out. The institutional constraints for realizing Ease-of-Doing Business and lack of financial empowerment of Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) have also been highlighted.

Application/Improvements: The paper calls for empowering and emboldening our PRIs so that quality grass ischolar_main learning has a cascading impact at higher levels of learning and facilitate our yen to be a major Asian power through the Skill India initiative.