Skill Development · Prior Art Revisited
A National Registry of Skill Trainers Needs a National Pipeline of Trainers
Hemen Parekh | 18 June 2026 | www.hemenparekh.in
The Centre has decided to set up a National Registry for Skill Trainers. It is a welcome step — a trusted, verifiable record of who is qualified to train will lift quality across the whole vocational ecosystem.
But a registry, by its very nature, can only do one thing: it catalogues the trainers who already exist. It does not create new ones. And that is precisely India’s binding constraint. Our shortage is not a shortage of willing trainees — it is a shortage of competent trainers to train them.
I had made this same argument ten years ago.
What I wrote on 6 June 2016
In a post titled “Skill Capital of the World?”, I worked through the arithmetic behind the Prime Minister’s vision of training 50 million youth a year:
If one institute can train about 1,000 trainees a year, we would need roughly 50,000 such institutes, each costing about Rs 100 crore — a total approaching Rs 50 lakh crore. The Government has neither the funds nor the administrative machinery to build this. There is only one way: turn the exercise into a profit-making proposition in the hands of the private sector.
A decade on, the conclusion still holds. Union Budgets fund schemes; they do not fund 50,000 campuses. If India is to produce trainers at scale, private capital has to build the academies — and the State’s job is to make doing so attractive.
We now have the proof of concept: L&T’s Skill Trainers Academy
What was a proposal in 2016 is today a working institution. The L&T Skill Trainers Academy (STA) at Madh, Mumbai, is a “trainer factory” in the best sense — its core mandate is the Training of Trainers, Training of Assessors, and Training of Master Trainers and Lead Assessors. In practice that means:
- State-of-the-art labs in the technologies of the next decade — AR/VR, IoT, 3D printing, Electric Vehicles and Solar — alongside conventional manufacturing, electrical and construction workshops.
- Coverage of 29 ITI trades, including New Age trades such as Solar Technician, EV Mechanic, Advanced CNC Machining and Automation.
- 570 polytechnic faculty already trained on Industry 4.0 and IIoT, with the academy’s reach now extending across Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh since 2021.
- A holistic philosophy spanning platform skills, domain skills and life skills — exactly the standard a national framework should aspire to.
If one corporate can do this, so can fifty. The question is simply how to make them want to.
The proposal: invite Corporates to build STAs, and reward them for it
I urge the Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship to announce a scheme that invites Corporates — Indian and multinational — to set up Skill Trainers Academies of their own, taking the L&T academy as the published benchmark and quality standard, with each recognised academy listed on the very National Registry now being created.
This is not without precedent. Section 35CCD of the Income-tax Act already recognises the principle of a weighted deduction for skill-development spending. What I propose is to raise the weight to 200%, extend it explicitly to capital cost, and ring-fence it for trainer-producing academies that meet the national benchmark.
Ten years of the argument, in one table
| What I wrote (June 2016) | What has happened since (2026) | What I now propose |
|---|---|---|
| “Skill Capital of the World” needs 50 million trained every year. | Trainer quality is now centre-stage; the Centre is building a National Registry of Skill Trainers. | Make corporate-run academies the engine that feeds that registry with quality trainers. |
| 50,000 institutes at ~Rs 100 cr each ≈ Rs 50 lakh crore — the State cannot fund this. | Budgets still fund schemes, not campuses; the funding gap is unchanged. | Mobilise private capital through a tax incentive instead of public outlay. |
| Turn skilling into a profit-making private-sector proposition. | L&T’s STA at Madh proves a corporate can run a world-class trainer academy. | Invite Corporates to replicate it, with the L&T academy as the benchmark. |
| Offer a 10-year tax holiday and “industry” status to skilling SPVs. | Section 35CCD already gives a weighted deduction for skill-development spend. | Enhance it to a 200% weighted deduction on capital + recurring expenditure, ring-fenced for STAs. |
| The focus was on training the youth (the trainees). | It is now clear the binding constraint is the supply of trainers, not trainees. | Aim the incentive squarely at trainer-producing academies (ToT / ToA / Master Trainers). |
In three sentences
- The Registry tells us who our trainers are.
- A network of corporate STAs is what will give us those trainers, in the numbers India needs.
- A 200% weighted deduction is the lever that will make Corporates step forward to build them.
I have placed this proposal before the Hon’ble Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Skill Development & Entrepreneurship, Shri Jayant Chaudhary, with a one-page scheme note attached. I first put the underlying idea on record in June 2016. The National Registry initiative now creates the right moment to act on it.
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