Indian youths, over the past decade, enter into the labour market mostly unskilled. In response to the recognised shortage of skills, the Government of India has launched various Skill Development Programmes under various schemes. Manipur, a hill-locked state, away from industries with its youth population on the rise, has many youths idle and unemployed. With the society’s obsession of government jobs over self-employment having impact on the perception of youths about non-governmental jobs, this paper aims to study the outlook of the youths on skill development programmes. The main objective of the paper is to study the perception of the youths enrolled in various skill development programmes. The primary data collected were analysed using IBM SPSS English version 21. A sample of 109 youths has been used to collect the data using random sampling method out of which 62 were male and 47 were female. The minimum age of the youth was found to be 18, while the maximum was 29 and it was also found that only 26 of them were married.  The study also, further shows that, there is no impact of the level of educational qualification on the enrolment of male and female youths in the skill development programmes.

KEYWORDS: Skill Development Programme, Youth, Perception