Daily News

View All News

India – Recruiters hopeful new budget will address skills development

26 February 2015

India’s recruitment industry is hopeful that the government’s budget will address the issue of skills development, as the country focuses on reviving its manufacturing sector and promoting its “Make in India” campaign, reports the Hindu Business Line.

“In the first full-fledged budget, the new government has an opportunity to address the challenges of a widening skills gap, promote capability development, and foster higher education and research under one umbrella programme,” according to Moorthy K Uppaluri, CEO of recruitment firm Randstad India.

Kamal Karanth, Managing Director of Kelly Services India, added: “The ‘Make in India’ campaign is expected to create around 100 million jobs by 2022. Employment exchanges in educational hubs and industrial clusters will help in a better demand-supply match.”

“An investment of INR 7.6 billion (USD 122.5 million) on skills development and entrepreneurship will boost the job market,” he said, adding that large investments in the infrastructure sector will result in the creation of additional jobs, including fixed-term contract hiring.

According to Mr Karanth, investment in the power sector is expected to create jobs in rural India. IT firms will see a rise in spend on staffing, and an increase in contractual hiring. Small and medium size enterprises will be one of the top job creators as they continue to boom. Employment exchange initiatives to create jobs along with changes in the labour reforms will signal a healthy job market in the near future.

Flexi-staffing can be an important catalyst in creating jobs and providing skills, but “we need immediate policy intervention to enable exponential creation of formal jobs,” said Rituparna Chakraborty, President of the Indian Staffing Federation (ISF) and Senior VP and Co-founder of recruitment firm TeamLease Services.

“In India organised and formal flexi-staffing has proved to be a stepping stone for over five million youth in the past decade alone,” she added.