AMRAIZ KHAN
Punjab Vocational Training Council is an autonomous body established by Punjab Government through PVTC Act 1988. It was conceived by former CM Punjab Shahbaz Shariff in 1988 as a tool for imparting skills and economic empowerment for the permanent rehabilitation of the poorest youth of our society.
The target of PVTC was rehabilitation and enabling the most deprived sections of our society to acquire skills for self-employment or be absorbed in private industry, instead of joining the ranks of unemployed. Even transgenders are trained in specific trades so that they are rehabilitated in society.
If this section of society is not enabled to stand on their feet, they are most likely to end up in street crimes and in the worst case to join the increasing number of drug addicts or be susceptible to be exploited by extremist groups involved in terrorism related activities.
The planned objective was to achieve a target of almost 2 million trainees by 2018, which unfortunately has not been achieved due to various factors and bureaucratic hurdles. Unfortunately, this grass roots level attempt to impart skills became a victim of political biases of various regimes in Pakistan, who fail to understand that it is the tax payers who fund such welfare schemes and not the political party under whose watch the PVTC was launched. In 2020 the Punjab Government appointed PVTC executives decided to reduce the number of trades and students being trained from 30 per class to 15 students.
They also reduced the number of trades in every VTI site by ordering each of them to reduce number of trades by 2 per VTI center.
