Karnataka - Bangalore   

Government's decision on teaching of English hailed

Special Correspondent

Bangalore: The domestic information technology-enabled services (ITeS) and business process outsourcing (BPO) industry has lauded the State Government's decision on Saturday to introduce English as a compulsory subject from the first standard in primary schools from the coming academic year.

According to the NASSCOM-McKinsey Report 2005, India will face a potential shortage of semi-skilled workers in the next decade, mostly in the ITeS-BPO sector. Currently, only about 25 per cent of technical graduates and 10 to 15 per cent of general college graduates are suitable for employment in the IT and BPO industries respectively.

NASSCOM pegs this shortage at five lakh by 2010 with 3.5 lakh in the BPO and 1.5 lakh in the ITeS sector.

The IT industry body has strongly pitched for educational reforms in States to improve the English speaking abilities of students.

"Spoken English is not a part of our traditional education. But the ability to understand and converse in English is an important aspect of the IT industry. If you don't have a reasonably good ability to speak English, among a few other attributes, prospective employers won't even look at you," says NASSCOM president Kiran Karnik.

Demand-supply crunch

India's rise on the world outsourcing stage has been primarily attributed to its abundance of English-speaking workers and low wages. But faced with a demand-supply crunch, the IT industry feels that it is time to focus on this aspect once again as it embarks on a national programme to tap the talent available in very distant corners of the country, rather than just limit it to the metros and other key cities, by transforming the "trainable workforce" into an "employable workforce."

Assessment programme

The national rollout of the NASSCOM Assessment of Competence (NAC), a national assessment and certification programme designed by the trade body in tandem with Hewitt Associates, will begin from November in 30 cities and will be gradually expanded to more cities.

The NAC, a common, transparent test across companies in the ITeS-BPO sector, is aimed at creating a robust and continuous pipeline of talent by assessing candidates on key skills such as written and spoken English, analytical ability and keyboard, quantitative and logical skills.

The online test will be open every day for designated hours and NASSCOM reckons that two million graduates will take the test annually.

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