Vinit Wahi / New Delhi

The Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has urged the Centre to give permission to form apprenticeship council in Maharashtra. He mentioned that Maharashtra successfully gave apprenticeship to 60 thousand candidates, highest in country.

He was speaking to the media after attending the first meeting of the Governing Council of the National Skill Development Mission (NSDM) chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi held at Prime Minister Office (PMO). Mr Fadnavis also discussed standardization of courses in such a way that it is recognized at international level and skilled candidate can get jobs globally. The skilled candidate must be able to get loan with ease and for that it was decided various government schemes would be link.

He informed that in the meeting, it was unanimously decided about the need to create National Standard for skill manpower and it should be recognized with word class standard which is presently active in Australia and Britain. Another good decision was to give opportunity of vertical mobility to candidate taking up skilling.

The meeting was attended by Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Minister of State (Independent Charge) Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Smriti Zubin Irani, Minister of Human Resource Development, Kalraj Mishra, Minister of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises and Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Communication and Information Technology. Senior bureaucrats, and corporate leaders, including, Cyrus P. Mistry, Chairman, Tata Group, Sachin Bansal, Founder and CEO Flipkart’ and Manish Sabharwal, Chairman and Founder, Team Lease Services also participated in the Governing Council meeting.

Some of the major decisions taken at the meeting included the following Skill training to be scaled up to cover at least 1.5 crore people during 2016-2017. The Central Board for Skills Certification to be set up by September 2016 to infuse quality into India’s skill development ecosystem.

Unutilized infrastructure in existing engineering colleges to be leveraged for skill training courses.