VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING

Vocational Education and Training

At present, Vocational Education is provided only at

the +2 stage and, even here, it is restricted to a distinct

stream that is parallel to the academic stream. In

contrast to the NPE 1986 goal of covering 25 per cent

of the +2 enrolment in the vocational stream by the

year 2000, less than 5 per cent of students choose this

option at present. The programme has been debilitated

by a range of conceptual, managerial and resource

constraints for more than 25 years. Apart from being

viewed as an inferior stream, it suffers from poor

infrastructure, obsolete equipment, untrained or underqualified

teachers (often on a part-time basis), outdated

and inflexible courses, lac k of vertical or later al mobility,

absence of linkage with the ‘world of work’, lack of a

credible evaluation, accreditation and apprenticeship

system, and, finally, low employability (Report of the

Working Group for the Revision of the Centrally

Sponsored Scheme of Vocationalisation of Secondary

Education, NCERT, 1998)

. Clearly, the gigantic and

urgent task of building an effective and dynamic

programme of vocational education is long overdue.

Institutionalisation of work-centred education as an

integral part of the school curriculum from the preprimary

to the +2 stage is expected to lay the necessary

foundation for reconceptualising and restructuring

vocational education to meet the challenges of a

globalised economy.

It is proposed, therefore, that we move in a

phased manner towards a new programme of

Vocational Education and Training (VET), which is

conceived and implemented in a mission mode,

involving the establishment of separate VET centres

and institutions from the level of village clusters and

blocks to sub-divisional/ district towns and

metropolitan areas. Wherever possible, it would be in

the national interest to utilise the school infrastructure

(often utilised for only a part of the day) for setting up

this new institutional structure for VET. Such VET

centres/ institutions also need to be evolved in

collaboration with the nationwide spectrum of facilities

already existing in this sector. This will imply the

expansion of the scope of institutions like ITIs,

polytechnics, technical schools, Krishi Vigyan Kendras,

rural development agencies, primary health centres (and

their auxilliary services), engineering, agricultural and

medical colleges, S & T laboratories, cooperatives and

specialised industrial training in both the private and

public sectors. These measures would natur ally call for

shifting and adjusting the resources of the present

6,000 - odd senior secondary schools with vocational

streams by dovetailing them with the new VET

programme. The vocational education teachers engaged

in these schools at present should have the option of

either being absorbed in to the work-centred education

programme in the same school or being able join a

new VET centre or institution in the region.

VET would be designed for all those children

who wish to acquire additional skills and/or seek

livelihoods through vocational education after either

discontinuing or completing their school education.

Unlike the present vocational education stream, VET

should provide a ‘preferred and dignified’ choice rather

than a terminal or ‘last-resort’ option. As with the

school, these VET institutions would also be designed

to be inclusive, providing for skill development of not

just those children who have historically suffered due

to their economic, social or cultural backgrounds, but

also of the physically and mentally disabled. A

well-designed provision of career psychology and

counselling as a critical development tool would enable

children to systematically plan their movement towards

their future vocations or livelihoods, and also guide

the institutional leadership in curricular planning and

evaluation. The proposed VET shall offer flexible and

modular certificate or diploma courses of varying

durations (including short durations) emerging from

the contextual socio-economic scenario. Decentralised

planning of these courses at the level of individual VET

centres/ institutions and/or clusters thereof would have

to keep in mind the ongoing rapid changes in

technology and patterns of production and services in

a given area, along with the diminishing access to natural

resources and livelihoods for the vast majority of the

people. The courses would provide multiple entry and

exit points with in-built credit accumulation facility. Each

course will also have an adequate academic component

(or a provision for a bridge course or both) in order

to ensure lateral and vertical linkages with the academic

and professional programmes. The strength of a VET

centre would lie in its capacity to offer a variety of

options depending upon the felt need of the aspirants.

The VET curriculum should be reviewed and

updated from time to time if the programme is not to

become moribund and irrelevant to the vocations and

livelihoods in a given area or region. The centre

in-charges or institutional leadership would need to have

access to adequate infrastructure and resources as well

as be vested with the necessary authority and academic

freedom to establish ‘work benches’ (or ‘work places’

or ‘work spots’) in the neighbourhood or regional rural

crafts, agricultural or forest-based production systems

and industries and services, thereby utilising the available

human and material resources optimally. This

collaborative arrangement has three advantages. First,

the VET programme can be set up with minimum

capital investment. Second, the students would have

access to the latest techniques and technology that

become available in the area. Third, the students would

get on-the-job experience and exposure to real-life

problems of designing, production and marketing. For

this purpose, it should be made obligatory for all kinds

of facilities engaged in production and services such

as agriculture, forestry, private and public sector

industries (including cottage and small-scale

manufacturers) to collaborate with the schools in the

area by providing the required ‘work benches’ (or

‘work places’ or ‘work spots’), in the addition to

offering training and monitoring support.

The success of the VET programme is also

critically dependent upon building up a credible system

of evaluation, equivalence, institutional accreditation

(extending to ‘work benches’ and individual expertise)

and apprenticeship. Care has to be taken to ensure that

such standardisation does not become a negative tool

for rejecting/ disqualifying the diverse knowledge and

skills that characterise the different regions of India,

especially the economically underdeveloped regions like

the North-east, hilly tracts, the coastal belt and the central

Indian tribal region. An appropriate structural space

and a welcoming environment will have to be created

in the VET centres and institutions for engaging

farmers, animal husbandry, fishery and horticulture

specialists, artisans, mechanics, technicians, artists, and

other local service providers (inc luding IT) as resource

persons or guest faculty.

The eligibility for VET courses could be relaxed

to include a Class V certificate until the year 2010, when

the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is expected to achieve UEE,

but subsequently it must be raised to Class VIII

certificate and eventually to Class X certificate when

the target year of universal secondary education is

reached. In no case, however, would children below

the age of 16 years be eligible for admission to a VET

programme. VET centres could also act as skill and

hobby centres for all children from the primary stage

onwards, and could be accessed before or after school

hours. Such centres should also be available for schools

to negotiate a collaborative arrangement for the

work-centred curriculum even during school hours.

In order to translate this vision of VET into

practice, several new support structures and resource

institutions will have to be created at various levels,

including districts, states/ UTs and the centre, besides

strengthening and reviving the existing national resource

institutions like NCERT’s PSSCIVE at Bhopal.