Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), an ambitious scheme to prepare the youth of the country for jobs, is now under scrutiny. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) in its report presented in Parliament on Thursday has found large-scale irregularities in the scheme.
This scheme was started in 2015. Its objective was to provide jobs to unemployed youth by giving them skill training. The government spent a total of Rs 14,450 crore on this scheme which ran in three phases from 2015 to 2022. The aim of the scheme was to provide training and certification to 1.32 crore youth.
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What irregularities did CAG detect?
The report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has revealed many serious irregularities under the Skill India Mission. The biggest problem was in bank account data, where out of the data of more than 95 lakh people registered on the Skill India portal, the bank account numbers of about 94.5% (about 90 lakh) people were either blank, or filled with non-valid information like ‘0000’, ‘N/A’, ‘NULL’. In the remaining cases, 12,122 bank account numbers were repeated, while some account numbers were highly suspicious, such as 11111111111, 1234567890 or just names, addresses and special characters.
This made it impossible to verify whether the training was actually taken by the genuine beneficiaries. Additionally, more than 34 lakh certified youth who completed training under the scheme are yet to receive their placement bonus or rewards. In many states (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, Rajasthan etc.) the same photo was used for many different youth. Errors were also found in the online survey; 36% of the emails bounced and out of the 171 people who responded, 131 had emails from the same training centre. The report also mentions that many training centers were closed, yet training was being shown in their name.
What is the government’s answer?
The government has said that in the beginning of the scheme it was necessary to provide bank account number, but later it was removed due to problems at the ground level. Now the money goes directly to the bank account linked to Aadhaar. The government also said that the scheme has now been strengthened after learning from past mistakes.
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Now new systems like e-KYC, face authentication, geo-tagged attendance, live dashboard, Skill India Digital Hub, etc. have been installed in it. Although the CAG report has pointed towards large-scale negligence and fraud in PMKVY, the government says that now the new arrangements will prevent such irregularities.
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