THE agenda for skilling the youth of a populous country like India is as important as the investment in physical infrastructure and support and incentives being provided for the growth of industries and enterprises in the new and emerging areas of technology.
Poor quality of skilling for the new Viksit Bharat would be even more disastrous than the poor-quality degrees as it will cripple the growth and development of the nation’s economy besides adversely impacting the quality of life of people and the support services. The current rapid pace of skilling without world-class skilling infrastructure should be a matter of great concern for the industries and the service sector. Low employability of graduates is the net result of poor skilling support currently being provided by colleges and universities in India.
As per a Fortune India report last year, “The economy is creating millions of jobs in next-gen sectors like solar power, electric vehicles, semiconductor and defence, but companies need to up-skill their employees first”. Advanced skillsets are required for the workforce of tomorrow that will comprise partly of those who are already in industries and need to be retrained and prepared for these advanced skills. However, a larger quantum of talented and innovative manpower is needed to be rolled out from the universities and colleges to meet the increasing demand of these advance skills.
World-class facilities
We need to invest heavily in both physical as well as knowledge-based skill infrastructure in the colleges and universities to meet the current and future demands of the skilled manpower for Viksit Bharat@2047. The idea of skill towers in the universities and colleges in India has been conceived from the point of view of empowering educational institutions with capabilities of imparting skills, both advanced as well as generic, to their students as well as utilise the skill infrastructure in the UNI3 framework for reskilling the industry and service sector workforce.
These skill towers shall have worldclass facilities for skilling, starting from commonly used quality services like modern-age plumbers, electricians, welders, technicians etc. on the ground floor, fashion design, creative arts and interior design on the first and second floors, IT-related training and skilling on the next floor, higherend testing and certification services, higher-end design and development, fifth-generation IT tools such as AI and ML and big data analytics on the upper floors, and so on.
Retraining up-skilling
Eminent professors of practice drawn from the industry besides mentoring the young, inspired minds in the classrooms shall provide their expertise for training and skill development in domains and disciplines covering work activities of both manufacturing and service sectors. These skill towers, besides skilling and boosting the employability of young students at the universities and colleges, would also act as the hubs for retraining and upskilling the existing workforce of the industry to make them relevant to new-age employment.
The framework of UNI3 integrated with skill towers will be a valid means to foster a new era of industry-academia partnership and empower Viksit Bharat with effective integration of knowledge and skills that the new age demands from universities of today and that of tomorrow.
