Skill India’s unmet promises: raising expectations for financial assistance in training for informal sector livelihoods

ABSTRACT

Recent research on vocational training in the global South suggests training may have the effect of unrealistically inflating trainee expectations of remunerative employment and upward social mobility. These studies, however, have focused almost exclusively on training for formal sector employment. The present paper, by contrast, explores how formal vocational training initiatives for informal sector livelihoods affect trainee expectations – and the flow-on effects these altered expectations have for their social and economic lives. It presents the findings of a study of agricultural training initiatives in north India. The study found that training – in conjunction with other local actors and institutions – had the effect of fostering unrealistic expectations amongst trainees, but instead of fostering expectations for paid employment, it fostered the expectation that the training certificate would lead to financial assistance from banks and/or government sources. When these expectations went unmet, they could have adverse consequences for trainees – including financial losses. The effects of distorted expectations differed as a function of gender and caste, with marginalised castes most adversely effected. This situation might be improved through better institutional linkages between the skill development sector, banks, and relevant government departments and through trainers imparting more realistic advice on prospects for financial assistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Informal sector training
• agricultural training
• skill geographies
• expectations
• inequality
• India

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Syed Shoaib Ali and Febe De Geest for research assistance and to Divya Nambiar for useful discussions which helped shape the focus of this paper. I would also like to thank Carol Upadhya, Syed Shoaib Ali, Annabel Dulhunty, and the two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Ethics approvals

The ethics protocol to which the research presented in this paper confirmed was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of Melbourne (ID number 1,851,028.1).

Notes

1. See https://nsdcindia.org/sector-skill-councils.

2. See www.nsda.gov.in/nsqf.

3. Agricultural extension entails educating farmers on current agricultural science and technology in the interests of increasing farmers’ yields and income (Benor, Harrison, and Baxter 1984).

4. All interviewee names used in this paper are pseudonyms.

5. In India, SCs are castes deemed to have suffered from historical deprivation and are targets for affirmative action initiatives. Relatively privileged castes not targeted for affirmative action are referred to as ‘general caste’.

Additional information

Funding

The research presented in this paper was sponsored by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (ARC DECRA) project titled ‘Agricultural Skill Development in India: Assessing Acquisition and Impact’ (Project ID: DE180100901) and by a University of Melbourne DECRA Establishment Grant.