The Tamil Nadu Skill Development Corporation (TN Skill) has so far delivered over 41 lakh skill certifications to more than 14 lakh studens across the State, Kranthi Kumar Pati, Managing Director, TN Skill, said on Wednesday.
Making a presentation on the State’s skill development initiatives at a capacity building and awareness workshop for the southern zone organised by the National Council for Vocational Education and Training (NCVET), Mr. Pati said that TN Skill has hit a unique student count of 14.6 lakh thanks to various initiatives by the government, especially the flagship Naan Mudhalvan scheme. He said that upskilling courses have been integrated into the university credit system where, for every semester, students require to take a course of 45 hours as an elective subject. The training is delivered by industry professionals, and the evaluation is conducted by a third-party organisation. Students get credit in their regular university credit system. “Traditionally, we have seen that such initiatives get clustered into a few institutions, a few urban centres. The most return we have seen is in the rural, remotest parts where students across the State could benefit from this initiative,” Mr. Pati observed.
Answering questions from experts, he said most of the courses were being run by partner organisations from the industry, like Oracle, CISCO, IBM, Google or Microsoft, and the mode of delivery was both online and in-person. The courses were first started in various engineering streams and were later extended to Arts and Science courses as well, having mapped each stream to the relevant industry.
K. Veera Raghava Rao, Secretary, Tamil Nadu Labour Welfare and Skill Development Department, said that skill development was hardly static and kept changing periodically across sectors. He said States should guard against the tendency of stagnation as the ecosystem moves from the top to the field level training partners.
Vinita Aggarwal, Executive Member, NCVET, said that purpose of the workshop was to disseminate awareness about the Council’s initiatives, a major one being recognition given to awarding bodies and assessment agencies. The NCVET had, she said, recognised 147 awarding bodies and 68 assessment agencies across the country. “If we improve the quality of these two bodies, we can improve skilling to a great extent,” Dr. Aggarwal added.
Jayant Chaudhary, Union Minister of State for Education, wished the participants through a video message. Besides Tamil Nadu, stakeholders from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Telangana, Puducherry and Lakshadweep participated.
Published – September 25, 2025 05:45 am IST
