Last month EducationWorld featured a cover story on raging skilling, upskilling and reskilling fever sweeping the country. Despite the Mahatma’s advice that children should learn with hands apart from head and heart, vocational education has been a blind-spot of the country’s omniscient education policy formulators for over seven decades. And although youth in schools and colleges, and adults in executive suites yearn for and are prepared to pay for high quality VET, administrative ineptitude and reckless certification rooted in subcontinental corruption which has wormed its way deep into the bowels of the education system, may well sabotage 21st century India’s belated discovery of critically important VET.

Following outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, the entry of Palestinian labour into Israel has reduced dramatically, especially in the construction industry. Therefore a few months ago, the Netanyahu government in Tel Aviv decided to recruit 10,000 trained construction labour from India. According to a report in the Indian Express (September 10), 5,000 workers were recruited through two “pathways” — Government-to-Government (G2G) supervised by NSDC (National Skill Development Corporation) and Business-to-Business (B2B) through private agencies supervised by the Union Ministry of External Affairs.

Israel’s requirement was for labour trained for low-skilled, iron bending, plastering and ceramic tiling jobs. To select suitably qualified workers (who would be paid Rs.1.9 lakh per month), three rounds of “professional tests” were conducted in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Telangana.

According to the Tel Aviv-based Elda Nitzen, chairman of the Union Association of Foreign Employment Agencies, most of the ‘tested’ workers had never worked in the construction industry, and many “did not even know how to hold a hammer”. For monitors of India’s education system, the causes of this debacle are clear. Slapdash training, ‘incentivised’ assessment and reckless certification.

Little wonder back home, newly built roads soon exhibit crater size potholes, and bridges collapse with regular frequency.