Kaushalya Vardhan Kendras Project

The Kaushalya Vardhan Project, conceived in December 2009, is a remarkable step in improving access and outreach of skill development in remote and excluded areas of the Gujarat state, It aims to rehabilitate school drop-outs, skill the rural youth, adolescent girls and housewives.

The initiative particularly helps connect women to the mainstream and achieve the social objective of women empowerment. The project is committed to train manpower as per needs of the industry and promote self-employment and entrepreneurship by multi skilling and certification.

Intervention

Kaushalya Vardhan Kendras provide training opportunities to the people at an affordable cost and flexible timings with latest technology, at their door step. Such a flexible approach helps the rural masses, particularly women to obtain necessary skills, even as they undertake their household responsibility. A total of 500 KVKs are functioning across Gujarat.

Strategies adopted for bringing about transformation

• Creating policy framework and identifying local available infrastructure.
• Initially, villages with a population of 10,000 (7000 in Tribal areas) were identified for this intervention, which is now revised to 5000 and clusters within 15 kms of these villages are covered with the skill center.
• Brain storming sessions with villagers / stakeholders for type of courses / timings / infrastructure available in Kaushalya Sabha in each of the cluster villages of KVKs.
• Visiting educational institutes to sensitize the youth and meeting with local industries and industrial association for selection of courses.
• IEC activities in the places like village dairy, panchayats, and community halls etc.

Highlights/positive features of the initiative

• Cluster based training through Government Owned Infrastructure
• Batch Size - 10 / 20 Trainees
• Minimum 4 courses for each KVK
• Soft Skills training component in each course
• The courses are selected on WISH concept: W- Women Oriented Courses; I -Industry Oriented Courses S - Soft Skill and Service sector related courses; H - Hard core traditional courses.
• No fees for SC/ST/Women/PH & BPL candidates and nominal fees of Rs. 50/- for general candidates
• Certification by Gujarat Council of Vocational Training (GCVT)
• No upper age limit
• Admission on the basis of School Leaving Certificate
• Exception is provided for those who have no School leaving Certificates and admission is on the basis of Oral Test
• Locally available Government building/rental building is used for KVKs
• Transparency and stakeholder participation, supervision and monitoring by nearest ITI
• KVKs have DTH Connections for regular lecture arranged through Bhaskaracharya Institute of Space Applications and Geo Informatics (BISAG)
• Due to saturation, transferred 102 KVKs to locations having more demand.
• Engaged knowledge partner for the purpose of helping in selection of out sourced staff, timely employment and quality based output, monitoring of KPIs set for KVKs, sharing knowledge, suggestions, issues and improvisations in the training of  Vocational courses, life skills, and generic skills and to add to the employability quotient of the KWK trainees.

Key takeaways

• Taking the training to the doorstep of people - adopting a cluster based approach to skill training can significantly improve access to Vocational training
• Participatory Course design  -involving the community to be trained as part of the course design ensures high enrolment and low drop out.
• Training in accordance with market  - demand driven, industry responsive courses enhances the opportunities for employment and self-employment.
• Creating linkages with markets - by fostering industry linkages and tie-ups with traders and marketers for home-based businesses, the KVK programme can be made more attractive for prospective trainees.
• Breaking the Gender stereotype - KVK programme has been able to break some of these barriers by offering courses such as motor driving and basic Computer education which are equally popular among men and women. The program has the potential to encourage participation of women in non-traditional occupations.
• Empowerment of women

Source : Skilling for employability - Best Practices

Related resources

• Directorate of Employment & Training
• Highlights of the Kaushalya Vardhan Kendra ( KVK)
• KVK Teaching Note
• KVK Case Summary