Crafting new service workers: skill training, migration and employment in Bengaluru, India

Abstract

The paper documents the role of skill training centres in Bengaluru, India, in the production of a peripatetic and precarious workforce for India’s new service economy. It describes how semi-educated youth from disadvantaged rural backgrounds are recruited for short-term training courses, which are promoted as a route to economic mobility, but are then placed in undesirable low-end and low-paid urban service jobs. Because the employment offered rarely matches their expectations or aspirations, graduates of training programmes often quit within a few weeks, returning to their home villages or searching for other job opportunities. The findings of the study suggest that skill training centres, rather than fulfilling their expressed goals of lifting rural youth out of poverty, contribute to the creation of a footloose and insecure workforce – thus catering to the requirements of organised service industries rather than the needs of unemployed youth. The paper contributes to current debates on youth unemployment, skill development, and labour precarity in the Global South.