AS India prepares to shape itself as a frontrunner in the community of nations and continues to advance as the world’s fastest-growing economy, it needs to focus on ensuring continuous supply of skilled manpower as per the needs of the knowledge-intensive, tech-savvy work environment for industries and the service sector.
For the economy to continue to grow faster than any other, besides economic stimulus provided by physical infrastructure push, increased urbanisation, investment in new emerging technology areas and ease-of-doing business that the Government has facilitated through its structural reforms, a massive investment in knowledge and skill infrastructure would be required. That would be required to shape its 700 million young people below the age of 25 into the world’s largest talent powerhouse of innovative and enterprising India. This is what the Viksit Bharat @2047 vision entails to make India a prosperous, happy and healthy nation.
A new paradigm
Universities and higher education institutes of tomorrow need to be developed along the framework of UNI3 in which universities and industries work together for a win-win situation. The universities get the benefit of industry orientation of their knowledge and research ecosystem and contribute a much bigger share of funded R&D and innovative product and process development. The industries, on the other hand, get the benefit of cost-effective research and product development support from the innovative minds of faculty and fertile and enterprising minds of students.
Together the universities and the industries connect to the local and regional needs of the community as well through the spin-offs of their CSR and USR activities support skilling and training programmes of high relevance to the community and local area development. The net result will be a more effective partnership and win-win for both the universities and the industries as partners in progress for the nation’s development. In this UNI3 framework, the students graduating from the universities will have both the employability as well as enterprising skills, and witness rich benefits of translation of research and creative ideas.
Framework of UNI3
In the framework of UNI3, the classrooms will become the clusters of deep learning, developing a deeper insight and creating an urge to innovate and see beyond woods. The low-cost Innovation Incubators in universities and colleges would facilitate innovative minds to translate ideas into patentable IPR and engage them in developing innovative products and new-age enterprises to make mass entrepreneurship a phenomenon in new Bharat of 1.45 billion people. This will make university education highly relevant in ensuring global competitiveness of the industries in the age of path-breaking scientific discoveries and game-changing technologies.
The time is right to put together new strategies of academia industry partnership along the UNI3 paradigm for higher education and skill infrastructure for Viksit Bharat of our dreams.
