Govt to expedite skilling of youth: Dharmendra Pradhan

New Delhi: The new Skill Development and Entrepreneurship minister Dharmendra Pradhan and his deputy Anant Kumar Hegde took charge of their respective portfolios here on Monday morning.

While speaking to newsmen at the ministry office, Pradhan expressed his gratitude to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for elevating him as the Minister of the "policy driven" ministry and avouched that the government to expedite skilling of youth.

"This is a policy driven ministry and in the last three years we have been able to lay down the foundation for skill development in the country," the minister said.

The government would also expedite its initiative to skill youth in different trades and develop entrepreneur skills as it looks to create employment avenues for one million youth who join the job market every year. "We will explore all possible grid system, information systems, technology advent that the country is witnessing, conventional jobs and new age skills to enable a more efficient outcome of our programs and schemes in skills," Pradhan told reporters.

Adding further the minister also mentioned that the government would try to bring scale and speed to the Skill Development programmes by bringing in convergence and coordination with states, departments, private institutions and other existing skill programmes. "Every year one million youth come in the job market. Our effort will be to coordinate with the state governments and other agencies to find employment avenues for them," the minister asserted.

Pradhan also said that job growth is an aspiration for any government. However, the incumbent NDA government is facing big uncertainty amid the floating reports about the job generation data in both national and global media.

Rubbishing all reports the new Skill Development minister said that, "This ministry has been doing good job and we will be giving it a major push to fulfill the objectives. Every month, there are more than 10 lakh youth joining the job market. Our primary objective will be to create grid across sectors, states and the aspiration of the youth and ensure all the requirements are well addressed."

After coming to power in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi created the new ministry for coordination of all skill development efforts across the country, removal of disconnect between demand and supply of skilled manpower, building the vocational and technical training framework and skill up- gradation, he said.

Skill Development Ministry is an additional charge that Pradhan has been given after he gets promotion in the Cabinet reshuffle on Sunday.