NEW DELHI: The ITI (industrial training institute) upgradation scheme introduced in the budget 2024-25 is expected to be approved by the Cabinet in the current fiscal year itself, an official in the skills development ministry told FE. “The ministry has prepared the proposal for the scheme, and it will be sent to the cabinet shortly. We have held multiple rounds of consultations with different stakeholders, including the state governments and the industry to prepare a comprehensive plan to upgrade existing ITIs,” the official said.
In the recent budget, the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has allocated Rs 3,000 crore for the scheme in FY26, which is significantly higher than Rs 1,000 crore approved in the previous budget for FY25. The ministry has spent just Rs 294 crore in FY25 in the preparatory work.
Even though the scheme was supposed to be launched in January, the proposal is still awaiting a go-ahead from the skills development minister. “The proposal is yet to be cleared by the minister but we expecting that the scheme will kick off in the current fiscal,” official said.
The department of expenditure has permitted the ministry to spend up to Rs 10 crore for preparatory activities, and the revised estimates of the scheme has been revised to Rs 294 crore.
Experts said that the upgradation of ITIs is a tough task given that many such “upgradation schemes” in the past have not yielded the desired results. In its reply to a query by the standing committee, the ministry said that “the financial assistance provided under various schemes in the past was suboptimal to cover the entire upgradation needs of the ITIs to meet the growing investment requirements for infrastructure upkeep, capacity expansion, and the introduction of capital-intensive new-age trades.”
The ministry said that the new upgradation scheme will be different because it will adopt a challenge method for selecting ITIs, ensuring state participation, industry collaboration, and an outcome-driven implementation strategy, making it distinct from previous efforts to improve the ITI ecosystem.
Under the new scheme, the government intends to provide skills training to 2 million youth across 1,000 upgraded ITIs in key sectors like construction, green energy, and advanced manufacturing. The scheme will work on a hub-and-spoke model with a revamped course content and design which will be aligned to the skill needs of industry. The scheme has a total outlay of Rs 60,000 crore out of which Rs 30,000 crore will come from the central government, Rs 20,000 from state governments, and Rs 10,000 crore from the industry (including CSR funding).
As on August 2024, there were 15,034 ITIs functioning in the country, out of which 3,298 ITIs were government-run and the remaining by the private sector.
Source: The Financial Express
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