Lack of skilled workers plague the city

CHENNAI:  The city is facing a crisis of skilled workforce due to a lack of quality technical educational institutions and there is a need to regulate these to fill in the void, according to an expert.Speaking to City Express on the lack of skilled workforce in the country, including the top and middle management levels, Ronesh Puri, Managing Director of Executive Access, said that in India there was only 20 per cent of workforce that was employable, highlighting the lack of quality institutions across the country.Interestingly, his comment comes in the wake of the All India Council for Technical Education, stating that only one per cent of the 1,450 technical institutions in the State met the prescribed norms. Puri, whose firm is one of the leading Asian executive search firms headquartered in Hong Kong, also attributed the lack of skilled manpower to the lack of quality teachers in professional institutions. “The quality is compromised as the teachers are not paid well. Compromising on quality of education does not attract talent,” he added.A staff member of a private engineering college on the outskirts of the city, who wishes to remain anonymous, says that parents want their children to gain admission in an engineering college and are least bothered whether the college has the proper infrastructure to provide them with quality education. “In many colleges, there is a lack of teaching faculty, the management is only bothered about teachers doing clerical jobs, rather than being the real academicians. Many a time, the students hardly visit the school library,” the staff member said.The issue of lack of skilled workforce has also been echoed by the Union Commerce Minister Anand Sharma during his visit to the city while stressing the need to improve the country’s manufacturing growth. As per government figures, India will need 200 million graduates and 500 million skilled persons by 2022 to sustain its double digit growth.“What is the need for opening a technical educational institute in every nook and corner when they can’t provide quality education or a skilled workforce?” reasons Puri. However, Puri says there is also a mobility of talent from the North to Chennai due to the presence of huge number of multinational corporations.