Budget 2014: Meet Sarbananda Sonowal, the Rs 25,000-crore man who will skill India's workforce

NEW DELHI: Little-known Sarbananda Sonowal, a 51-year-old minister from Assam, could soon preside over a Rs 25,000 crore-plus kitty and oversee a task dear to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s heart — skilling India’s teeming workforce.

This is because the Modi government’s first Budget is expected to transfer most, if not all the skill development and training initiatives under at least 21 different ministries, to the newly created ministry for skill development and entrepreneurship headed by Sonowal.

Over the past month, Cabinet Secretary Ajit Seth has met top officials from the ministries of labour and employment, finance and HRD, among others.

PM Gives Top Priority to Skills

During the meetings with various ministries, Seth discussed the shifting of their training divisions and attached offices dealing with skills to the new ministry, along with their budget allocations. “Though all these ministries have resisted the move and justified their own performance, it makes no sense having so many multiple agencies working incoherently in silos and delivering little, especially after the government has created a skill development ministry to give the issue the harmonised and effective thrust it needs,” said a senior government official aware of the development.


India has the largest number of young workers in the world, but just 2% of its workforce has any skills or training of some form and 12 million youth are joining the workforce every year, far faster than the pace at which jobs or training opportunities are being created. With the PM assigning top priority to skill development to prevent socio-economic unrest and cash in on India’s muchvaunted demographic dividend of a large and young workforce, officials believe incumbent departments’ resistance to losing turf wouldn’t be allowed to hold up the formation of the new ministry.

A similar jostle for retaining domains had scotched the idea to set up a skill development ministry that had been mooted by Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, after the 2009 Lok Sabha polls. The skill development ministry presently has no officials apart from Sonowal.

While Sonowal has so far steered clear of commenting on the specifics of the new ministry’s domain, he has indicated that the Modi government will take a fresh look at the skill development space and the Budget could offer a big signal of its intent. A leader who rose from the ranks of Assam’s student unions, Sonowal had joined BJP in 2011 and won half the 14 seats in Assam in the latest Lok Sabha election as the state unit’s chief. Sonowal had termed sealing India’s border with its eastern neighbour as his top priority after taking charge in the Modi Cabinet and is famous for successfully approaching the Supreme Court to strike down a law that tied authorities’ hands on deporting illegal immigrants from Bangladesh in 2005.

With the PM having called for an India that is known for its skills instead of its scams, Sonowal may find his hands full with the task of fixing the country’s complex and archaic training architecture, soon after the Budget. In the interim Budget for 2014-15, the government has provided around Rs 22,000 crore for skill development programmes under 21 ministries and another Rs 25,000 crore for education-related expenses, including scholarships, subsidised education loans and sectoral training programmes.

As per the plan, the Director-General of Employment and Training, an attached office of the labour ministry that oversees industrial training institutes, apprenticeships and other vocational training programmes, could be shifted entirely to the skill development ministry. Similarly, the technical education wing of human resource development ministry, the National Rural Livelihoods Mission, and Ajeevika programmes under the rural development ministry would be brought under Sonowal’s purview.

The National Skill Development Agency, set up under the finance ministry in 2013 to coordinate skill development efforts, could also be rendered redundant, said an official. “You can’t have an agency and a ministry doing the same thing. So the agency may be dovetailed into the ministry or scrapped altogether as it hasn’t done much since it was created,” he said. While the HRD ministry would retain the oversight of university and higher education, other areas such as open and distance education under its watch could see some convergence with the skill development ministry, just as condensed courses for educating women run by the ministry of women and child development.

Though UPA had set an ambitious target of training 500 million Indians by 2022, the government’s own manpower research think tank had debunked these numbers as highly exaggerated. For the Twelfth Five-Year Plan that ends in 2016-17, a target of training 50 million people had been set, leaving another 450 million to be trained in the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan.