Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) will soon have their own central board of certification . Union Minister for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Rajiv Pratap Rudy on Wednesday said that the board will grant students certificates on finishing school at ITIs to dispel the stigma around vocational education.
“The government has decided to set up a central certification board to give equivalent certificates to students of ITIs, which currently number around 2.3 million,” Rudy said at a media briefing in New Delhi. He added that ITIs have gone through a complete reform of their structure, curriculum, syllabus and assessments and will soon come to standards equaling the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and Indian School Certificate Examinations.
The move aims to help students at ITIs to pursue regular courses in other courses and colleges and is designed to further the mobility between vocational and formal education systems.
Earlier, he had announced that the Directorate General of Training was permitted by the Human Resource Development Ministry to conduct exams for 23 lakh students in ITIs at the matriculation, secondary and higher secondary levels and award those who clear these exams with certificates.
“Sadly, our policy has always been to put the students who didn’t perform well at school, or dropouts, into the ITIs… and they are not given matriculation or higher secondary certificates. So, we have ended up creating a system which has 18 lakh seats for engineering students, but of which 8 lakhs are lying vacant, without any takers,” the minister said on the subject of labour stigmatisation, adding that education in India has been biased against skills and that manual work has been looked down upon.
[Source”timesofindia”]