Bhavna Chopra0:19
We note the growth of stainless steel is happening in India. If you look at the global averages, per capita consumption is about 6 kg per year, but in India it's about 2.5. And with the growing focus on infrastructure and other applications, you know, medical is growing, chemical is growing, food processing is growing. So there is a need for more workforce when it comes to the stainless steel industry. But what we realized at JSL was that there was no dedicated focus on building skills for the stainless steel world. JSL, being India's largest manufacturer, seventh largest manufacturer of stainless steel and an industry leader, wanted to take this initiative and say, how could we help in shaping and creating a skills ecosystem for the stainless steel industry? And that's what inspired us.
So we are talking about becoming a 10 trillion dollar economy. We are talking about Atmanirbhar Bharat. We are talking about Make in India. Now are we saying that we don't want to be competitive in the world? So if we need to start being competitive in the world, we need those skills to become competitive. I think a great example of where we've done it is the IT industry. Indian IT professionals are considered among the best in the world, and they mainly train all in India. Okay, they might be reskilled and upskilled anywhere else, but it is our engineering institutions that have sent those people out into the workforce. And similarly, you know, now moving to Make in India and Atmanirbhar Bharat, unless we really focus on skills, it won't happen.
I've come from the skills ecosystem. I spent a lot of time. I was working at NSDC, and I think the government has done quite a bit. The Prime Minister himself, we know that the Skill India movement is very close to his heart. The movement was started by Dr. Manmohan Singh, our former Prime Minister, and it has continued. I think politically we all realize the importance of Skill India. There are a lot of policies and schemes like the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana, which is running in this area. There is a lot of focus and thrust on upgrading the ITIs, which are the Industrial Training Institutes, which are a large source of blue collar workforce. So while a general work has been done on increasing visibility around skills and also giving some infrastructure, I think what we need to focus on, and in collaboration with government, how do you do sector specific skilling? So specifically like we've been speaking about welders and fabricators, how do you assign different amounts of funds and dedicated funds for this development? It was done also in the construction industry. So it would be good if we can now start doing it.
Right, so collaboration has to happen with all the players of the ecosystem. So there is a demand gap. There is a demand for skills. And when we talk about demand, we are talking about not... and unfortunately, I think in the Indian scenario, people tend to think that demand will come from the large players. JSL, large players like JSL, we can't be an employer of more than say 10,000 people in the country. The major amount of employment will happen in the downstream and the application industry of stainless steel. So the players over there also need to collaborate. That means industry and then the supply, where the supply comes from, which is the engineering institutions, ITIs, the polytechnics, they also need to start collaborating. And we have to have much easier ways and means of collaborating with the supply side. So demand and the industry has to have much easier ways of collaborating and then creating a lot of infrastructure, both physical as well as a lot of intellectual infrastructure around stainless steel.
The successes... let me start off with the successes. Like we are running courses in polytechnics in Odisha and Haryana, and we do hire people out of those, you know, the ones we've trained in stainless steel. So that has been a big success for us. We are running courses in engineering institutions. That itself has been a very big success for us. And we've done the fabricator training programs where we train more than 40,000 people in this arena. But the big challenge, of course, will always be scale in a country like India. It is uniform across segments. But the other challenge would be to be working in development of the MSME stainless steel and downstream itself. It is governed by a lot of MSME units. Some of them employ 10, some of them employ 25, 50, 200. Big units will employ probably people. So we need to start, we need to figure out a good ecosystem that can skill people in the MSME. I see that as the biggest challenge so far.
It's a really loaded question and it's not easy just with a simple answer. But of course we are talking about digitization. We are talking about, let's talk about welding. We are talking about robotic welding. We are talking about AI-driven welding. Where is the skilled workforce to operate those things? And then we are talking about increased applications of SS, stainless steel. I give you an example. We're talking about life cycle costing when it comes to railways and bridges. Where are the engineers who understand life cycle costing and can design a high, you know, these big bridges? Because they don't have the skills or the knowledge to be able to do it. So when we are talking about future, it is not just in terms of technology, but it is also in terms of applications that we will need much more of the skilled workforce.
