The Geopolitics and Meaning of India’s Massive Skills Development Ambitions

Abstract

Several institutional threads lay behind the paper that follows. One of these, mentioned earlier, is that there had gradually been building over the first decade of the 2000s in many international agencies and foundations a recognition that, despite the narrow focus of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), technical and vocational education and training, or skills development, were crucial elements in economic growth as well as in diversified career development. The year 2012 had certainly been a very rich for those interested in the links between skills and jobs, and it had seen the launch of a number of major global reports on this topic. In May, came the International Labour Organization’s World of Work Report 2012 (ILO, 2012) and the Shanghai Consensus of UNESCO’s Third International Congress on Technical and Vocational Education and Training (UNESCO, 2012a), as well as the new OECD skills strategy, Better skills, better jobs, better lives (OECD, 2012). In June, the McKinsey Global Institute’s The world at work: Jobs, pay and skills for 3.5 billion people (McKinsey, 2012) arrived, and October saw two more: the World Bank’s World Development Report 2013 on Jobs (World Bank, 2012), and the long-awaited EFA Global Monitoring Report 2012 on Youth and skills: Putting education to work (UNESCO, 2012b).