The Hindu : Business : ‘Educational system needs overhaul’

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jul 06, 2007
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Business

‘Educational system needs overhaul’

Staff Correspondent

Call for involvement of corporates

New IIITs, finishing schools planned
To launch NAC-Tech programme

CHENNAI: If the current boom in the IT and ITeS industry is to continue for another decade, the educational system needs a series of changes, says the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) President, Kiran Karnik.

Mr. Karnik said there should be changes in the current curriculum and syllabi. It also needed to be updated with the introduction of new courses to meet the future demand. Nasscom was in the process of identifying the gaps in the curriculums, he added.

He wanted the education to be privatised and called for the involvement of corporates in the universities. Nasscom, along with the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), plans to set up new IIITs (Indian Institute of Information Technology), finishing schools, and extend Nasscom Assessment of Competence (NAC) to the IT services sector.

The IT body had taken the employment pyramid approach to understand the industry’s skills requirement and create specific education and development accordingly. The base of the pyramid represented simple technical skills (including entry level jobs in the BPO industry and vocational jobs like networking and hardware maintenance).

The middle stood for skills, which were the mainstream and account for the majority of the existing shortage in the industry. The top of the pyramid, represented high-end technology skills (in areas such as bio-informatics, embedded software, product architecture, DSP, VLSI, program management and multimedia convergence), which were niche today.

Mr. Karnik said one of the biggest human-power challenges faced at the level of higher-end education was the paucity of Ph.Ds and research scientists.

At present, post-graduate education was lagging behind undergraduate learning, with barely a handful of takers for the top-of-the-line Ph.D programmes.

He said Nasscom and the IT industry along with HRD Ministry planned to launch five new IIITs based on the public-private partnership model, by the year 2008. In the next few years, it planned to set up around 20 IIITs.

Mr. Karnik said it planned to offer Nasscom Assessment and Certification-Tech program (NAC-Tech) for the BPO and IT services sector starting this academic year. The aim was to make NAC-Tech an industry standard for evaluating students aspiring to find jobs in the technology/engineering industries. Similarly, finishing schools for engineering students had also been launched.

The Chairman of Nasscom and Vice-Chairman of Cognizant Technology solutions, Lakshmi Narayanan, said the IT / ITeS industry was growing at the rate of 30 per cent. The industry was evolving with new technology and innovations. Today, the industry directly employed 1.6 million people and had created six million indirect employments.

Mr. Lakshmi Narayanan said new opportunities in other innovative models such as Knowledge Process Outsourcing were growing and captive industries were playing an important role in this segment.

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