The Cellular Operators’ Association of India (COAI) and Centum Learning on Thursday launched an outreach programme to mobilize under-privileged youth for skills training on a pilot basis.

Initially, the pilot project will be run in Bihar and would cover a subscriber base of over 1.5 crore people.

Following this implementation, it will be rolled out nationwide by COAI member telcos to cover nearly 400 million subscribers after the formal launch of the scheme in July.

The initiative would help implement ‘Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana’ (PMKVY), a flagship outcome-based skill development scheme under the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, which plans to skill over 2.4 million people across the country.

“Skill India is going to become an accelerator in Make in India and Digital India,” Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said.

Telecom providers would send text and voice-based awareness messages to the target audience. Interested youth can give a missed call to a toll-free number and an interactive voice response pushed to the candidate would capture relevant details on an online application.

Data analysis would then be done with callers being profiled on the basis of their age and location. Finally, interested candidates would be mapped to their nearest enrolment centres.

“Since early in the 11th Five Year Plan, the National Policy on skill development has set a target of 500 million people to be skilled by 2022. With such ambitious targets, the challenge of reaching out to the millions of people for mobilising them to learn professional skill sets needs to be overcome,” Rajan S. Mathews, director general, COAI added.

IANS