After economic liberalization in 1991, industrialization in India succeeded, thanks in large part to the information technology and consumer goods industries. Judging from the enormous unemployment problem in this country after independence, we need to evaluate such industrialization based on employment opportunities as well as industrial growth.
In this paper, the author discusses the characteristics and problems in human resource development for skilled industrial workers, focusing on industrial training institutes (ITIs) at the secondary education level. These institutes have acted as an engine for technical training in India. ITIs were started in 1950 in India to meet the requirements for skilled manpower to ensure national industrial growth. These ITIs were based on the Craftsmen Training Scheme under the control of the Ministry of Labor and Employment. The establishment of ITIs showed a growth trend in the 1980s, which increased rapidly after the 1990s. However, a clear imbalance is evident in the regional distribution of ITIs. South India has many more ITIs than North India, suggesting that the rapid increase in the number of ITIs in India can be attributed mainly to the increase in the south. This trend is particularly true for newly established private ITIs. The increasing capacity of ITIs in South India is supported by the high rate of school attendance for basic courses and the opportunities that foreign countries provide to seasonal workers.
Graduates of ITIs face uncertain job prospects; many remain unemployed after graduation. This seems to be attributed mainly to the hierarchical personnel affairs system to which Indian companies adhere and to the changing industrial labor market, which has undergone an increase in the number of contingent workers and has contributed to deskilling in recent years.
An investigation of ITIs in Bangalore clarified the diversity and disparity among schools. However, large-scale government ITIs and some private ITIs have improved their educational facilities and contributed excellent skilled workers to the industrial labor market. Recently, some manufacturing companies have begun collaborating with ITIs to improve industrial training.
Due to their broad distribution and large seating capacity, ITIs have the potential to reduce the severity of Indian employment problems. It is important to learn from the experiences of ITIs in South India.

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Since the 1990s, a network perspective has attracted an increasing number of economic geographers. It conceptualizes economic objects as a set of networks of relationships among various actors such as firms, establishments, public organizations, and businesspeople. The aim of this paper is to consider the significance of the social network approach. It emphasizes that actors' behaviors are affected by the contents of relationships and the network structure. In other words, economic behaviors are embedded in networks of relations. This approach is useful especially to explain how knowledge is circulated and learned. In the context of the geography of knowledge, it is argued that the diversity of actors matters in the process of new knowledge transfer and creation. In the light of the social network approach, the diversity argument is about the contents of relationships and the characteristics of network structure. It is weak ties, bridges over “structural holes”, and forming links accidentally or randomly that contribute to accessing diverse sources of knowledge and to the circulation of novel and useful knowledge.
It should be noted that little attention has paid to the geographical aspects in the social network approach in economic sociology and organization studies. In economic geography, the problem of proximity among actors in the networks must be focused on. It is argued that geographical proximity facilitates the efficient transfer and learning of knowledge, especially sticky knowledge. However, we must avoid falling into the oversimplified scheme that geographical proximity necessarily determines the possibility of the transfer and learning of knowledge. In addition to geographical proximity, organizational proximity must be taken into consideration. Organizational proximity means the similarity of routines and practices shaped by organizations. Knowledge can be transferred beyond local and national boundaries if organizational proximity is sufficiently strong. In addition, the probability of the successful transfer and learning of knowledge partly depends on institutional proximity, that is, shared frameworks of formal and informal institutions. What should be noted is that geographical, organizational, and institutional proximities are not independent of one another but interrelated. We must address these interrelationships among the three types of proximities.

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