SUCCESS STORIES: Rural students of engineering who graduated to the IT sector under the Jawahar Knowledge Centre programme of the State Government narrate their experiences in Hyderabad on Sunday. — Photo: P.V. Sivakumar

HYDERABAD: Encouraged by the success of Jawahar Knowledge Centres (JKCs) in bringing together the industry and institutions, the State Government has decided to increase the budgetary allocation to them from Rs. 4 crores to Rs. 16 crores during the current year.

The Government has decided to set up three 21st Century gurukuls in three regions of the State, in line with a suggestion made by Prof. Raj Reddy of Carnegie Mellon University, for effective industry-institution-Government linkage. The Government has asked the officials concerned to work out the modalities for extending the benefit of JKCs to the weaker sections to ensure social justice.

"The selection to JKCs is made on the basis of merit, but we need to ensure social justice to the best extent possible," Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, has said.

He was participating in a programme got up by Information Technology and Communications Department on Sunday to felicitate students from engineering colleges in rural areas who secured placements in MNCs like Infosys, Wipro, Satyam and TCS through campus placement.

Training in soft skills

The Chief Minister set a target of imparting training in soft skills to 24,000 students through JKCs to give them the "last mile linkage" to suit the industry needs.

The JKCs had trained 6,000 students across the engineering colleges in the process of which, 1,258 were taken into seven leading IT multinationals.

Dr. Reddy said that more than 65,000 students secured employment in IT industry during the last two years against the target of employment to at least three-lakh people in the IT and IT-enabled services.

This, in turn, meant that 70,000 to 80,000 jobs needed to be created in the next three years of which at least one-third should be from the JKCs. He wanted the officials to ensure that the concept was extended to all the engineering colleges across the State in the next two years while at the same time, the officials were asked to concentrate on roping in all the regular degree colleges.

Minister for Mines and Geology and IT P. Sabitha Reddy, AP State Council for Higher Education chairman K.C. Reddy, Institute of Electronic Governance president Ghanta Subba Rao and others spoke.

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