To address concerns around hiring good-quality blue-collar workforce for companies, the Directorate General of Training (DGT) along with the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship has created a public registry with relevant skilling information. Further, they have also opened it up through APIs (Application Programming Interface) for other tech companies to access and enrich the database.

The effort will not only address these concerns for early-stage startups which need good quality workers to scale up quickly, but also provide opportunities for job seekers from ITI and similar institutes to get jobs easily. ITIs are industrial training institutes mostly run by the government to provide skill-based training to the youth and make them job-ready for industries and software companies.

With the help of a public registry on one side young graduates seeking employment can validate their degree certificates in skill training and on the other hand prospective employers can check and validate the certificates produced by them by checking the registry database. This will make it cheaper for companies to onboard blue-collar workers rapidly and in a cost-effective manner.

In order to enable a check being done on the registry digitally, it has been created in a machine-readable format. Further with the opening up of API connections the database can be ‘pinged’ by other companies directly or through aggregators.

"Startups catering to blue-collar workers can really benefit from these open Registries and verifiable digital credentials. There are so many possible use cases - registries allow startups to compete on creating the best rating or locator app for a variety of training centres,” said Rajesh Aggarwal, additional secretary DGT to Tech2. “Credentials make it simple to verify a claim of completed training and automatically review many candidates at scale.”

Also this will enable job marketplaces like Naukri or LinkedIn to verify the information shared by the candidates from these institutes and connect them to the right employer. This also opens opportunities for startups to create a database for blue-collar workers, connecting job seekers with prospective employers.

The government has also introduced digitally signed PDF certificates for all ITI students to prevent fraud and tampering of certificates. While it has started with students passing out of ITIs across the country, the effort of the government is to push adoption among other private education platforms as well.

“We have created these registries with machine-readable format and open APIs to allow other organisations to also play a part in disseminating this information. Moreover, these organisations will be able to return feedback on the data allowing us to crowdsource verification of data,” said Aggarwal.

This should open up a new scope of business and innovation for startups which can build search engines on top of the registry and help small startups find the right talent. Companies can create a Linkedin equivalent for blue-collar workers, mainly relying on this digitized database.

This will help startups who are looking for employees with basic technical knowledge, who can operate basic software platforms like Tally. Companies can verify the information shared by the applicants in their job applications, therefore, ensuring a supply of good quality and genuine employees.

“Finding quality employees to manage regular and basic technological aspects of our business has always been a challenge, if the government can actually create the registry and open it up for integration for tech companies, we can partner with such entities and benefit largely from it,” said a top executive of a digital payments company which has a feet on street model to service merchants who use its payment solutions.