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Shantanu Prakash said, "We are confident that the current government, with its emphasis on harnessing technology in all critical areas that impact the country, will certainly give a lot of emphasis to technological intervention in education to solve the critical problems of access and quality in education."Credits: Interviewed by - Rozelle Laha, Editing - Vijay Shankar, Camera - Ratnesh Singh, Head Video Editorial – Sapna Bhardwaj
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The National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) has pledged to skill 3.3 million youth in the current fiscal year. The target is nearly three and half times of what was set and achieved for 2013-14. NSDC has achieved its annual skilling target of 1 million in 2013-14.“While we are fully focused on delivering the number of skilled people as promised at the start of every year, we are also completely conscious of the quality of the manpower we deliver. We have robust and well defined quality checking processes that ensures that the skilled hands we deliver meet the needs of the industry. We believe skilling must improve the employability of our youth, create greater employment opportunities and support their entrepreneurial spirit,” said S Ramadorai, Chairman, NSDC, at NSDC’s bi-annual Partners’ Meet on August 5, 2014.“There is a huge corporate interest. Mood is upbeat. Creation of the standards have connected to productivity and led to a win-win situation between the employers and the trainees. Employers and industries have to recognize skills, and reward skills and applaud skills,” Dilip Chenoy, MD & CEO, NSDC said during an interaction with Businessworld.There is an increased interest among the corporate sector for looking at skill development as a business strategy going ahead. Last year, NSDC had approved five corporates in a mix of funded and non-funded proposals. This year, it has a target of approving five more. These corporate houses are setting up training institutions to train people for themselves and for the market. In the skill space, over past two and half three years, NSDC has received 139 new partnerships, in the corporate sector and is currently in the process of reviewing another 200 applications, informed Chenoy.In 2013-14, NSDC brought 1.05 million youth into the skilling eco-system and skilled 1.3 million more under the National Skill Certification and Reward Scheme, also known as STAR scheme. NSDC also signed four Memorandums of Understanding with University Grants Commission, University of Pune, National Urban Livelihood Mission-Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu Open University. The Uttar Pradesh Skill Development Mission signed Service Level Agreements with eight Sector Skill Councils within NSDC.
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How can quality content be ensured in schools?Quality content requires collaboration between various stakeholders involved in creation of course content. This includes the government, private publishers and the larger education fraternity. In the present scenario while private schools have access to quality content, the government run schools are closed to private publishers. There is no collaboration on delivering content or using the expertise of private publishers to design textbooks for students of government schools. In other parts of the world, such as South East Asia, Africa, Singapore and some other developed markets, private publishers are allowed to produce material for government schools. In India, the National Council of Education Research and Training does that job; the NCERT is actually supposed to provide research and training, but has limited itself to becoming a textbook publisher while it can do more. Publishing is a very specialized industry and increasingly so writing textbooks and developing superior content has become a very specialized task.A definite way to ensuring quality content is that schools be given a choice on textbooks they wish to use, be it from government or private publishers. What we think is necessary and important is that schools and students should have a right to use quality material, irrespective of where it is coming from. Right now, there is a growing gap between private elite schools that are using textbooks by private publishers and government schools that do not necessarily have access to quality content all the time. That’s where government policies should be so shaped that they are conducive to content development and dissemination of quality education.Have you ever tried tying up with the government?We are interested in working with the government towards co-creating high quality content for students. However, due to varying priorities collaboration with government agencies has thus far not been possible. We would expect the new government which has been talking about involving private bodies, to be inviting private publishers to participate in this kind of thing.Do you see the publishing sector growing in the coming years? How about Education publishing?The growth rate in education publishing has been around 10-15 per cent year-on-year. For the publishing industry, there has been a slowdown in general interest trade publishers’category because of e-books and readers moving online. Even within education publishing while the enrolment is growing, children are not reading a lot. But the growth in publishing is still coming from the education space and not from the general interest space. People who earlier used to read books for pleasure are now going on social media probably. The time one would spend on reading even a thriller or a mystery novel is now spent on Facebook. The general interest reading has slowed considerably and this has impacted the sector, but education publishing is growing and will continue to grow. With increasing number of parents willing to send their children to private schools and invest in quality content and education, the sector will keep flourishing.Should the policy makers be looking at making some modifications in tax quotes?There needs to be a consistent tax structure for print and electronic. Presently, print is tax exempted but online content is taxed, this is unfavorable to education players in particular. Tax can be enforced on entertainment videos and non-educational e-content but not everything that is online should be taxed. In India, where reading habit is not the best we need to encourage people to read (online) if we need to raise the standards of education. It is not just a textbook you want a child to read, you want them to read a wider variety of books like reference, literature, fiction or poetry. How are we going to do that if you are going to tax it?
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The government needs to encourage education rather than run educational institutions directly. It should stop building new schools or colleges, and instead invest that money in Public Private Partnership ventures and bring in credible private sector partners. We would expect the new government to make our educational institutions globally competitive and attract non-Indian students, says Shantanu Prakash, Chairman and Managing Director of Educomp Solutions Limited. What are your expectations and recommendations from the forthcoming budget? We would like the new budget to include a well laid out policy framework that addresses the issues of employment and skill based education. Given the large number of youth in the country, job creation needs to be revived on an urgent basis and the education should firmly focus on skill development so that successful candidates can start to work immediately and do not need to be trained again. We would urge the new government to allow foreign institutions to set up base in India and permit joint ventures and collaborations that will boost the education sector in the country. The new government should create viable public-private-partnership (PPP) initiatives in education sector which will not only reduce the burden of the government, which incurs high cost of providing basic infrastructure facilities but also lead to construction of state-of-the-art schools and providing high quality education to underprivileged children. The new government is planning to increase spending on education to 6 per cent of GDP. Will it help enhance technological interventions in education? The way to look at this is that 6 percent is already a 50 percent jump over existing spending of 4 percent of GDP on education. It is therefore a very positive move and we are confident that the current government, with its emphasis on harnessing technology in all critical areas that impact the country, will certainly give a lot of emphasis to technological intervention in education to solve the critical problems of access and quality in education. Is there a need to enhance private investment in education? Private investment in education is imperative to expand infrastructure and provide greater access to quality education. Therefore, there is an urgent need to enhance private investment. Various estimates suggest that in case private capital is freely allowed to participate in education, it can unleash an investment of over Rs 10,000 crores over the next 12 months. However, in order to invite more participation of private sector in education space, the government should intervene and make special efforts such as provide incentives like tax breaks for the corporate/ private sector to develop and support educational institutions and simplify the regulatory framework by rationalizing the number of regulators while providing more operational autonomy to private institutions. What is your take on the needs and challenges confronting the education sector? Despite the tremendous growth of education sector in India, the access to quality education remains largely confined to urban and semi-urban India while large swathes of rural India are still deprived of even primary education. Schools in rural areas continue to suffer from paucity of committed teachers and lack of proper infrastructure. Therefore, there is an urgent need to create proper infrastructure and provide basic facilities such as textbooks, notebooks, stationery, library books, uniforms etc. and provide both hardware and software support to ensure that students are well versed with computers. Further, in order to enhance the skills and talent of our students, there is a need to set up a regulatory body, which will frame guidelines and supervise teaching methodology to raise the quality of education. There is also a need to build-up regulatory consistency and business friendly legislation to allow profit and non-profit companies to set-up educational institutions that will attract capital not only from India but from abroad as well. How can the new forthcoming budget be useful for technology solution providers? We are hoping that now there will be greater emphasis on innovation and the forthcoming budget from the new government will have a more creative approach to solving the problems that ail the education sector. Technology holds the key and we are hopeful that the new government will create more meaning partnerships with us to jointly take the benefits of quality education to the underserved areas as well as create education delivery models that will put our youth on par and help them compete globally. Our hon’ble President has already mentioned in his address to the joint Parliament session that setting up virtual classrooms will be a priority for the new government and companies like us in the space (e-enabling classrooms) can expect good things from the forthcoming budget.
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Top five IT majors will add nearly 250,000 employees, 60 per cent of them fresh from educational institutions in the coming year, according Avinash Vashistha, Chairman and Managing Director, Accenture India.A candidate can expect better packages with a sector specific certification. Acquiring digital skills will be crucial as businesses are going digital. Even the graduates joining the major IT companies could improve their salary by up to 50 per cent by doing a skill course in any IT specialisation, said Vashistha. He was speaking at a skill development summit organised by All India Management Association, the national apex body of the management professionals, in India.Given the abysmal placement figures across most technical and management institutions, Vashishtha’s remark brings a ray of hope. For instance, a student who completes a specific course on infrastructure management or analytics in his final semester during MBA would be entitled to get a better package, than his counterpart doing a general MBA.One needs to make an informed choice on his modules. There is no defined means or counseling body to assist students to decide on the modules that suits a particular industry. A student needs to do a lot of networking, beyond just indulging in the regular curriculum to be able to gather the skills in the industry he wishes to apply, said Pramod Bhasin, Chairman, The Skill Academy and former CEO, Genpact, speaking at the summit.Echoing the need to upskill students, Bhasin said, “Skills had to be made aspirational to raise participation in skill learning programmes.” He pointed out that in India only about 5 per cent of the workforce had certified skills compared to the majority in China.Focus of the country’s skill development efforts should be towards its unorganised sector. “We must address the unorganised sector which employs 95 per cent of the country’s workforce. We need to apply the NOS and certification there,” said Bhasin.India had to develop national occupational standards (NOS) for each type of skill for aligning education and training with the needs of the employers. “Every student who passes higher education should be empowered to get a job,” said Dilip Chenoy, CEO and Managing Director, NSDC.NSDC is already working with the employers to develop occupational standards for different jobs and integrate those with training and education. Defining the skills for specific jobs posed a significant challenge, remarked Chenoy. Defining skills narrowly allowed easy standardisation, testing and certification whereas narrow definitions could become obsolete quickly. Accenture, the firm that validates all numbers related to NSDC’s accomplishments, revealed that by 2030 India will add 249 million youth to its workforce, whereas China will deplete workforce by that time. The next largest addition will be only 19 million, in Pakistan. “India has an opportunity to provide workforce to the world, but without education and training that opportunity can also become an issue,” said Vashistha.
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While it is common knowledge that the real estate sector is in the midst of its worst-ever slump, Noida-based Jaypee Infratech (JIL) seems to have bucked the trend. The infrastructure company’s net sales revenues stood at Rs 3,318.69 crore in March 2014, up from Rs 550 crore in 2009. All this, with a simple strategy — selling real estate in bulk. The opening of the six-lane 165-km Yamuna Expressway, connecting Greater Noida to Agra and radically reducing travel time between the two cities to just 90 minutes, too, contributed to the company’s good fortunes. The expressway project was awarded to Jaypee on a build-operate-transfer model. When the expressway was inaugurated in 2012 the areas adjoining it began appreciating. This meant good times for JIL. Till March 2014, the company had sold 56.60 million sq. ft of real estate space. Concurrent to the expressway, the Formula 1 races, brought to India by Jaypee in 2011, also contributed to the group’s turnover. The race track created a buzz that led to real estate in its vicinity being considered prime property and, thus, helped JIL notch up sales of a further 25 million sq. ft, says Manoj Gaur, chairman and managing director, JIL.“There are two revenue streams for JIL — one from the sale of real estate and the other from expressway toll,” says Gaur. The company currently holds land parcels in Noida, Jaganpur, Mirzapur, Tappal and Agra. Toll on the expressway, initially in the range of Rs 23 lakh to Rs 25 lakh a day, now yields Rs 45 lakh to Rs 50 lakh a day on an average.Going forward, JIL has a target of building more than 27,000 homes, with 107 million sq. ft already under construction. “Once these are completed, we will be able to recognise the revenue streams,” says Gaur. JIL has recently ventured into the healthcare segment as well. Jaypee Hospital, a wholly owned subsidiary at Wish Town, a Jaypee-built township in Noida, is what Gaur considers a “very positive thing for shareholders of Jaypee Infratech”. The group expects a turnover of Rs 800 crore in two years’ time from the hospital. (This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 11-08-2014)
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