‘SKILLING’ EDUCATED YOUTH FOR INSECURE EMPLOYMENT IN THE INFORMAL ECONOMY

Skilling has become a key issue in contemporary development discourse on global youth. This chapter traces the rise of skilling discourses within global policy setting and combines this with a focus on the working out of these programs in the Indian context. It discusses how skilling is viewed as a mechanism through which to increase the economic value of youth who have limited and poor-quality schooling in the Global south. Given this dominant framing of skilling within a human capital approach, transnational skilling discourse assumes strong linkages between skilling, national productivity, social mobility and poverty alleviation. However, as research from India demonstrates, this terrain is shaped by uneven postcolonial development, and earlier discourses and practices of skilling, embedded in socio-historical relations of caste, class and gender. With little engagement with this context, recent vocational and skill training policies and programs target marginalized youth as flexible labor for global capital, even as it engenders discourses of social mobility. Youth negotiate unequal educational opportunity, insecure employment and discourses of aspirational mobility in diverse ways. Skilling’s contradictory impulses serve as a site for examining how caste, class and gender relations are socially reproduced as well as disrupted through youth encounters.