Centre to set up national registry for skill trainers

New Delhi: The skill development and entrepreneurship ministry will soon establish a comprehensive Skill Instructor Registry (SIR), a move aimed at addressing critical gaps in availability of training instructors under multiple skilling schemes across the country.

The ministry has kick-started the National Instructor Management System (NIMS), which will act as a data repository, and is nudging all instructors working across the government and private industrial training institutes (ITIs) to register on the portal to facilitate instructor mobility and integration across schemes, a senior government official told ET. "This initiative will help strengthen availability of qualified instructors across ITIs, Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana and Jan Shikshan Sansthan centres within the overall skill ecosystem and enhanced training quality through better deployment and monitoring," said the official, who did not wish to be identified.

Besides, it will eliminate duplication and fraudulent entries, establish a verified database and enable data-driven decision-making for policy and planning.

The plan is to extend NIMS beyond the ITI ecosystem in the next phase to other skill development schemes, thereby enabling a unified national framework for instructor management.

The government is of the view that ITIs have been facing persistent challenges such as fragmented instructor data, absence of a centralised repository, and gaps in effective deployment and monitoring of instructors.

While India's formal skilling ecosystem has an estimated capacity of about 95,000 instructors across more than 14,000 ITIs, currently, there are about 60,000 certified trainers. NIMS will act as a centralised, verified and real-time digital repository of instructors, thereby enhancing governance, transparency and operational efficiency across the ecosystem. Under this, a unique instructor permanent registration number (IPRN) will be issued to each instructor for digital identity and inter-state mobility.

Besides, there will be standardised digital registration and verification workflows to ensure data authenticity along with batch-level mapping of instructors for optimal deployment and capacity utilisation.

The portal will also enable end-to-end lifecycle management, including transfers and resignations, integrate them with learning management systems and training of trainers programmes and undertake artificial intelligence-based performance assessment.