The Confederation of Indian Industry has said that the country will need about 10 million skilled people every year in support services over the next five years and it would work with the state governments to upgrade the skills of the students from the school level itself.
ICICI bank CEO and CII president K V Kamath told the media on the eve of the two-day national council in Hyderabad that 'skilling' was the key area and big challenge for the country.
"We need to create 10 to 12 million jobs a year in the next five years. Jobs exist but do we have the skills. The answer is no," he said.
Kamath said that these were not the white collar skills but the support service skills like the security guards, people for hotel industry and housekeeping and in retailing.
Kamath, who also met the Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy on Wednesday and lauded the infrastructure development in Andhra Pradesh, said that the CII feels a deep intervention was required in getting the required skills up.
"We need to address these issues at school level and provide vocational training whether it is village school or urban school," he said.
The CII president said that the body had started talking to the state governments and it was ready to work with the state governments in upgrading the Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and schools. "So far so we had excellent response from every state government that we have talked to about this."
"To me within the soft agenda, skill development becomes a key agenda if we are to employ 10 million people a year for the next five years," he said.
Kamat stressed that having economic growth and manufacturing and infrastructure growth targets was not enough for the country.
"We need to have a development agenda which is all encompassing including access to health education, skilling, affordable housing rural dynamism access to financial and other products and lower barriers to entrepreneurship."
Migration will also be another challenge the people are going to face in the coming years, he said.