Australia to help India train 4 lakh trainers, assessors

New Delhi, April 11 (IANS) : Australia will collaborate with India to build capacity of four lakh trainers and assessors over the next few years, Australian Minister for Education and Training Simon Birmingham said on Tuesday.
“We believe we can help because you recognise and acknowledge our experience in a very successful vocational education system,” Birmingham said at the 4th Australia-India Skill Conference, 2017, held in conjunction with the visit of Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull to India.
Birmingham said Australia is well placed to help India in reaching its target in training, and added that the programme would also look at scaling up the number of apprentices in India.
Speaking on the occasion, Rajeev Pratap Rudy, Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, said: “For very long, in India, education did not carry the skills along. Skills never got the focus that it should have.”Rudy said India need to train 400 million people in organised and unorganised sector.
Talking on training Junior commissioned officers of armed forces as trainers and assessors to fill the shortage of trainers, Rudy said: “The young trained junior commissioned officers who have long trained in many technical aspects of Indian armed forces… generally they retire young after 20 years of service.
“So, we have partnered with Indian armed forces… we have established mechanism where these youngsters, who are to retire, within six months of their retirement they are put to certain courses where they can be trained as assessors or entrepreneurs or trainers,” he said.
“I think this programme is going very successfully now and we have launched several batches of such youngsters,” he added.
Rudy said the Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to make India a hub for international work force.
The two ministers also launched ‘International Trainers and Assessors Training Courses’, a joint initiative between the Government of Australia and the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC).
The conference was organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in partnership with the Department of Education and Training, Government of Australia, under the ambit of the Australia-India Education Council, on Tuesday.
The conference focused on how technology and automation will impact jobs in future.