NABARD Grade A Current Affairs — 27 October 2026

The Green Skills Passport, promoted by EY, is a global initiative designed to certify individuals in sustainability-related competencies needed for green jobs. It maps skills against emerging roles in the low-carbon economy, helping workers and employers identify gaps and pathways. India's green transition — driven by its net-zero by 2070 commitment and National Skill Development Mission — makes such frameworks increasingly relevant to workforce planning across agriculture, renewable energy, and rural development sectors.

Green jobs are defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as work that contributes to preserving or restoring environmental quality, reduces energy and raw material consumption, limits greenhouse gas emissions, minimises waste and pollution, and protects or restores ecosystems. The Green Skills Passport concept operationalises this definition by creating a verifiable credential framework — mapping what competencies a worker needs, at what level, to fill roles in sectors like renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, green construction, and circular economy.

For India, this connects directly to several policy layers. The National Skill Development Mission (NSDM), administered by the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship through the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), is India's primary vehicle for workforce skilling. NABARD's rural credit and livelihood programmes increasingly fund green agricultural transitions — organic farming, watershed management, climate-resilient crops — all of which require certified green skills. The PM Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) is the flagship scheme under NSDM, and its iterations have begun incorporating green skill modules.

The ILO estimates over 24 million new green jobs could be created globally by 2030 under ambitious climate policies. India's target of 500 GW of renewable energy by 2030 alone implies millions of technicians, installers, and engineers requiring certified competencies. A passport-style credential system helps bridge the recognition gap between informal green-skills training and formal employment — directly relevant to financial inclusion and rural livelihood schemes that NABARD finances.

The Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE) 2027–28 is proposed to be conducted from April 2027 to March 2028, aligning its survey period with the financial year. This is a structural shift from earlier ASUSE cycles, which did not follow the April–March calendar. The survey covers unincorporated non-agricultural enterprises and is a key source of data on India's informal economy, employment, and value addition outside the formal corporate sector.

ASUSE — Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises — is conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) to capture data on non-agricultural unincorporated enterprises in India. These are enterprises that are not registered under the Companies Act or similar statutes, forming the backbone of India's informal economy. They include small traders, artisans, street vendors, and micro-manufacturers.

The survey measures key indicators: number of enterprises, workers employed, gross value added (GVA), capital formation, and emoluments. Because this sector is largely outside formal financial reporting, ASUSE is one of the few systematic instruments that makes it statistically visible — critical for GDP estimation, labour market analysis, and policy targeting.

The proposed alignment of ASUSE 2027–28 with the financial year (April–March) is methodologically significant. When survey periods straddle two financial years, data reconciliation with national accounts becomes complex. A financial-year-aligned survey period makes it easier to integrate ASUSE findings with GDP estimates, Union Budget outlays, and sectoral plans — all of which follow the April–March cycle.

For NABARD aspirants, this matters because unincorporated enterprises in rural areas — including agricultural input traders, rural artisans, and SHG-linked micro-enterprises — are captured in ASUSE data. For UPSC aspirants, the survey connects to governance themes: economic census, informal sector formalisation, and the statistical infrastructure underlying welfare scheme targeting.