Bangalore-based SkillSonics India Pvt Ltd, which offers vocational courses in partnership with Swiss Vocational and Educational Training (VET) institutions, has secured Rs 22.5 crore ($3.77 million) from the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) to accelerate its target of training and certifying up to a million engineering technicians by 2022.
Founded in 2011, SkillSonics provides skills training programmes to Indian engineering sector covering automotive and auto components, equipment/machinery, light and precision engineering, heavy engineering, electrical/durable manufacturing and electronics assembly organisation. It plans to expand its presence to eight states and to meet this target, it will increase its team to over 3,000 people.
"We believe that drastic steps must be taken to skill up the Indian labour force, while enabling greater employment opportunities for the millions of educated unemployed youth. Moreover, there is a dire need to empower our industry to compete globally, which is possible only with internationally acceptable levels of skilled manpower," said GP Chandra Kumar, chairman and CEO, SkillSonics.
“An estimated 12 million youth get added to the workforce every year and they need to be trained with relevant skills, meeting industry demand to be employable. Currently, only 5 per cent of India’s workforce receives any sort of formal training as against, say, 70 per cent in Germany or 95 per cent in South Korea. We need to scale up our training offerings both in terms of quantity and quality to make youth employable," said Dilip Chenoy, CEO and MD of NSDC.
NSDC is a non-governmental organisation created by the finance ministry; it provides viability gap funding to build scalable, for-profit vocational training initiatives.
Last February, it invested Rs 3.65 crore in Apollo Med Skills, a medical training arm of Apollo Hospitals Group. In 2011, NSDC invested Rs 4 crore in Laurus Edutech Life Skills Pvt Ltd besides putting in Rs 15 crore in Everonn Skill Development Ltd.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)
