Purpose: Skill development has received much attention in recent years primarily because India is having a unique advantage of young age-population with reducing dependency ratio which is known as ‘population dividend’ while the developed nations have an aging population with increasing dependency ratio. Skill development is one of the major emerging and relatively less explored field of research in India at the sub-national and regional level. The study attempts to find the status of stock of educated and skilled persons who have formal and non-formal vocational training and technical education with respect to Uttar Pradesh.
Data/Methods: The unit level data of NSS for the available quinquennial surveys on employment and unemployment (61st & 68th round) has been used to calculate the stock of educated and skilled persons in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state of the country. The 68th round is the latest round of NSS on employment and unemployment. The level of education and vocational training along with the level of technical education has been taken as an indicator of skill and analysis is done considering individuals for all age group. Further, the region wise distribution of stock of skilled persons has also been performed for the young age population. The results have been presented with using bivariate analysis the paper has highlighted the status of education and skill for two time period in Uttar Pradesh and India.
Findings: There is very low attainment of technical education (0.84%) in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2012 with a slight improvement over 2004-05. There is a decline in attainment in vocational training in the latter period (7.9%). The share of formally skilled persons in Uttar Pradesh has also declined in 2012 (1.1%) over 2005 (1.6%). In terms of education, 32% of persons are still illiterate, which is a major cause of concern.
Application: The study has greater applicability for the acedemicians and the policy makers to initiate the focused policy initiatives at the regional level to improve the skill level among the labor force as it has clearly highlighted the disparities in skill attainment across the regions of Uttar Pradesh.