Skilling India – Approach in the 12th Five Year Plan

- Srishti Gupta

The challenges that India faces in terms for ensuring sustainable livelihoods for its rising youth population are gigantic. While programs like MNREGA have their own utility in the nation’s context, few will argue that imparting quality skills in an inclusive manner is the surest way to deal with menace of poverty that shames our nation even after years substantial economic growth. Therefore, it is imperative that the 12th Five Year Plan should build on the foundations laid by the 11th plan and deliver the required results at the earliest. Losing more time is bound to have dire consequences.
  

 There is an aim to increase the percentage of the workforce which has received formal skills through vocational education and training from about 12.0 per cent at present to 25.0 per cent by the end of the Twelfth Plan. This would mean that about 70 million more people have to be imparted formal skills in the next five years. The obvious question is that do we have the required infrastructure? Well, the skill ecosystem in India needs considerable expansion, while simultaneously resolving the numerous ills that plague the present arrangement. Some of the most pressing ones are flagged below.

A highly fragmented regulatory regime and multiplicity of Ministries (almost 19) have stifled any scope of bringing about the much desired efficiency for years now. Accreditation and certification system, as correctly observed Coordinated Action Plan on Skill Development, needs an urgent revamp. Another pressing concern is to be able to reorient curriculum on a continuous basis to make it responsive to the industry needs, reach out to the millions of dropouts/disadvantaged and resolve the problem of unemployability of even the so called “trained”. Skill Sector Council is certainly a bold and suitable measure with a need to cover more sectors and industries.

As noted by the Planning Commission in its approach paper, disseminating information about the availability and effectiveness of training programs is crucial. The role Employment Exchanges, NCVT and the SCVTs could play is dissemination of information on the nature and quality of training particularly with respect to enrollment, institutional capacity, completion information and graduate follow-up data from all registered vocational institutions. This will enable the government and the stakeholders to see whether the system is responding to employers’ needs and devise policies accordingly. The work is ongoing on this front.

There is a palpable need for establishing flexible learning pathways integrated to schooling on one end and higher education on the other through National Vocational Education Qualification Framework (NVEQF). This would mean addressing the issues of vocationalisation of school education through creative means. Imparting soft skills alongside has become highly relevant and has global precedence. Vocational education in our country has been accorded an inferior social status and energies have to be invested to break such stereotypes and induce excellence which will also be beneficial for the economy.

The system of Industrial Training Institutes and Industrial Training Centres need significant expansion and a lease of fresh energy to skill in numbers required. Public-Private Partnerships in financing, service delivery, and provision of workspaces and training of trainers are being promoted but a robust mechanism to regularly assess them is clearly found wanting. 

The issue of Skill Development crucially depends on other issues like status of literacy at all three levels, general state of employment, state of labor markets, functioning of labour intensive sectors and industries, and appropriateness and strength of social program. Even a cursory glance on these parameters confirms the level of challenges that daunt pursuit of skill development of the nation’s workforce. Therefore, an integrated approach is a must and all departments have to join hands and support the ongoing policy efforts. Additionally, since states lie at the forefront of implementation of these policies, they must not allow federal tensions to hamper the progress of their respective Skill Development Missions.

Skill development has been accorded a very high priority during the 12th Five Year Plan by the present Government and rightly so. According to Union Labour Minister Mallikarjun Kharge the number of Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) in the country had increased two fold during the last five years with the addition of 4,000 more institutes and capacities has been increased to training 13.75 lakh persons annually to cater to the expanding workforce in the country. National Skill Development Corporation has also been actively partnering private sector players to further augment the process of skilling. Well, it is undeniable that there has been considerable progress on this front during the last Plan yet an element of rigour can be conveniently said to be missing which is something that this nation cannot afford at this point. There have been systematic efforts to involve and inspire industry but the average citizens seem to be untouched about the relevance and importance of the issue. Their involvement has been minimal or nil. Ideas like community college rooted in local ecosystem have the potential of eliciting greater participation from the community but they are still in the pipeline. Therefore, government should pay some thoughtful consideration to brace itself with more rigour while pursuing its skill development targets and also transmit this zeal to the nation’s citizenry which holds wondrous powers in democratic polity like ours.

Meta University – “Facebook of Institutions”

Srishti Gupta

The concept of Meta University marks a paradigm shift in the field of higher education and skill development and India has become the first nation to take this giant leap. This article tries to delineate the concept of Meta University, its present status, and future implications.

What is a Meta University? 

It is essentially an open platform where students will be able to access courses from other universities, interact with international faculty members and, in the process, generate knowledge. Simply put, this will allow students to pursue two courses simultaneously in two different institutions.

The main purpose of Meta Universities is to share open learning resources by different universities by using latest technologies available in order to enable students to benefit from learning resources available in different institutions.

Combining “Collaborative learning” and “Trans-disciplinary learning”, this open platform will also allow students from remote locations of India to access courses from other universities, interact with international faculty members.

In a sense, Meta Universities represent 2nd Generation Universities, free from physical boundary conditions and able to operate in virtual space, taking advantage of the innovation and flexibility possible in such domain. Hence the existing capabilities and resources of these institutions will be utilized through means of high order of cooperation.

With a network of Universities coming together offering courses cutting across disciplines, it is believed that the Meta University will reinterpret the concept of a University as not just a traditional, physical space of learning, but as a repository of knowledge and information that can be delivered in multiple ways, and can be accessed from anywhere and anytime. It will seek to enhance the learning experience through new and innovative delivery models of education that allow students and institutions to collaborate in unprecedented ways. Thus the 21st century meta-university would be a network and an ecosystem rather than a single brick and mortar space – “a Facebook of Institutions” in the words of Mr Kapil Sibal.

The Present Status

The setting up of the Meta University was announced by the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, on Tuesday, while releasing the first report of the National Innovation Council (NIC).

To give this idea shape, a National Mission on Education through ICT [Information and Communications Technology] has been mounted under Dr Sam Pitroda. This will link 25,000 colleges and 2,000 polytechnics for enabling e-learning and content sharing. A National Knowledge Network (NKN) has also been created which will soon link 31,000 college of which 1,100 open source courses have already been created according the estimates available. In view of the new opportunities available and leveraging the National Knowledge Network, the National Innovation Council has also proposed to create the first Global Meta University.

As of now, the centre has also got the nod of the HRD Ministry and it is extending assistance of Rs 25 crore. The Ministry of Human Resource Development is in process of setting up a Meta University at Delhi in which, Jamia Milia Institute, Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi would participate. Since the Government does not interfere in the academic matters of higher educational institutions, it is left to these institutions to collaborate and to identify the courses and areas to be offered through the Meta University.

Delhi University and Jamia Millia Islamia have already announced the admission for the first course under meta-university concept. The application process for a two-year joint degree programme 'Master of Mathematics Education' (equivalent to MSc Mathematics Education) for the academic session 2012-13 will start from October 29.

Implications

This is overtly an innovative and highly commendable move for higher education in India. It also promises a unique opportunity to the country for innovation, given the huge unmet demand for high quality education in an environment of limited resources and availability of a dedicated national network.

Issues relating to intellectual capital and skill development have unprecedented importance of social and economic well being of today’s India. The kind of challenge the nation faces in terms of skilling its population is humongous. The government is endeavouring to push ahead its skill enhancement agenda through the “Coordinated Action on Skill Development” with a three-tier institutional structure . However, only providing the required skills is not enough; issues like credible certification and employability are equally important. Meta University can be deemed as an innovative move towards imparting divergent skills and expanding
employment horizons for students.

A robust system to assess efficacy of the model being introduced can suggest real merit that the idea holds and the changes required. The need of the hour certainly is to intersect education, employability & employment ecosystem to accelerate India’s journey. Meta Universities clearly can play a highly significant role in this regard. With collaborations also being explored with other nations like UK to evolve a Global Meta Alliance, the idea surely holds a lot of potential.

Education and Technology: Why digital literacy must replace literacy as a parameter of education!

Shashank Shekhr Rai

I do not want to waste time and space here to lament the Indian education system the way it exists today. Indeed the ground for developing talent into professionals is far from ideal and consistent efforts from the government to push the cause of education among the rural areas and the underprivileged urban communities have failed to reap any satisfactory results. One reason is the lack of equity that exists and despite the much maligned input based approach of the government, as opposed to a more output based approach, we still do not have on board a system that can guarantee a minimum quality in education for every student irrespective of the geography or the demography. The fact is that we just do not have good enough teachers or enough good teachers.

Teacher training has been promoted over the last decade or so but as we increasingly put our faith in teacher training without seeing any significant improvement in students’ skills, we continue to lose the battle.It is here that I believe technology has a big role to play in our efforts of democratizing education, in ensuring that a student in a village in Bihar gets the same quality teaching as the student studying in the best private school in Delhi. We have had some welcome news in this regard as Salman Khan’s videos are now in the process of being translated in various Indian languages. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), an innovative concept of professors at MIT, can prove revolutionary in the education space. Coursera, a MOOC program which was launched in April, 2012, provides courses from the best universities that students can take online and already has more than 1.75 million users across the world. This was hot on heels of Udacity and was followed by EdX – similar programs that use technology to take courses available to students who were, till very recently, unable to afford the best education possible. Hope is that soon these courses could also be used for accreditation. In K12 space, Mindspark – an adaptive online application - has reinvented the way kids learn with its expertise on students’ misconceptions. As the government aims to provide Akaash tablets to all kids in government schools, such services will prove to be the cornerstone of any technology driven initiatives. While the benefits of technology may seem endless and can give rise to new, more efficient ways of teaching, it depends crucially on the quality of usage. Distributing tablets is barely the first step and would fail to make any significant impact unless accompanied with proper training on how to use technology. There needs to be constant monitoring of how devices are being used and to what end. This may even change the role of teachers into more of coaches, a requirement which may eventually be worked out better than training teachers. In places where quality teachers are available, technology will enhance the teaching as a supplement and a complement. There are professors in US universities who have turned the traditional model upside down and use readings and videos as a prelude to a class as opposed to assigning them as homework while the class time is used for discussions and debates. But for all of this to materialize, digital literacy is a basic requirement in a country like India. We can no longer treat technology as just another subsidy. Taking technology to the grassroots will be accompanied by large costs and substantial portion of that costs will have to be dedicated to training students, teachers and all stakeholders concerned. It also requires a change in mindset. Policy makers can no longer obsess over literacy as a parameter of development. Indeed, digital literacy is what we need to be concerned with. If the last ten years have taught us anything, it is that it is difficult to plan for technology and what it may do to change the paradigm. But what we can do is be prepared for changes. Digital literacy is the first step in that preparation.