New Education Policy 2020: Why India Needs to Mainstream Vocational Education

In a country like India, with a booming youthful population and a diversified workforce, vocational education plays a critical role in supporting skill development, employment, and economic progress. In recent times, India is seeing all out efforts to enhance the enrollment for skilling programs, with the aim of creating work-ready graduates, through vocational education and internships. By the 2019–2020 All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE, 2020), over 15.2 million students were enrolled in various vocational courses at the undergraduate and the postgraduate levels. This significant enrollment highlights the need to expedite the process of bridging the skill gaps, keeping in mind the industry requirements. In this endeavour, the issues identified and required to be addressed, include, perceptions of vocational education as a secondary option, ignorance of potential career paths, and the private sector’s unwillingness to absorb a greater proportion of skill trainings that align with the economy’s emerging needs. This chapter examines the composition of India’s vocational education system, the previous 10 years’ worth of efforts to improve worker skill levels, and the potential impact of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 on meeting the country’s skilling goals, if it is implemented effectively and with clear goals in mind. The study compares the inherent barriers and the efforts taken in each setting to produce outcomes that result in enhanced employability, as it examines the skilling initiatives in South Korea, Singapore, Germany, and India. The study provides actionable insights and suggests effective implementation of NEP-2020 in India. This paper examines the comparative skilling approaches in the tourism and logistics sectors of India, providing specific insights on skilling related to tourism, to bring to light the gap between the two. Additionally, it suggests measures to overcome the challenges faced in building a better skilling ecosystem in India, through effective policy execution and by strengthening industry links, as the country’s economy grows. The paper concludes that even the most well-designed models of vocational education, however, will not produce the desired results unless the learners are willing, there are verifiable job outcomes, and the stakeholders actively collaborate to create a win-win situation for all.