People Drifting Away From Technical Education For Lack Of Quality

Education 4.0 is about meeting the individual needs of a learner, understanding and personalising the teaching pedagogy for better outcomes.

It is vital to reach out to the students and equip them with the necessary skills and knowledge for quality education leading to better outcomes.

During the BW Businessworld 5th Higher Education Conference, Navin Mittal, IAS, Commissioner of Collegiate & Technical Education, Government of Telangana said the Education 4.0 and Industry 4.0 need to have a partnership, and one cannot lead without the other. He talked about PM Modi who dreams for India to be a leader in Industry 4.0 and said we need to improve Education 4.0 to be able to achieve that.

Navin Mittal said, “People are coming into higher education, but the quality is not matching since the education is not meeting the aspirations and hence, people are drifting away from technical education.”

He also cited an example of Telangana, where people in tech education have reduced to half in the past 5 years. The capacity of tech education in India is somewhere around 35 lakhs but the admissions are only 12-13 lakh and out of which, only 7-8 lakh pass out each year.

We don’t have academia to solve the demands of Industry 4.0 from Day 1, and this gap needs to be bridged. The students need to compulsorily have the basic problem-solving skills, interpersonal skills, communication skills followed by the technical skills and has to be a continuous learning path for the future.

Another academician Dr. Sandeep Sancheti, Vice Chancellor of SRM University spoke about Tamil Nadu doing really well on the education front boasting of some of the best government and private colleges in the higher education space.

He also snubbed the numbers saying the will always be changing, but if India is doing well, education must be doing good followed by the industry.

He said, “Technology has always been ruling the roost. Education changes slowly since it is human-centric and it has to be an anytime, anywhere, any mode of learning and any degree sort of thing to embrace the change, allowing us to experiment more.”

Paul Dhinakaran, Chairman, Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences said, “PM Modi has been stressing on Make In India and universities have to be the innovation centres for that, moreover investing in faculties and lab staff becomes a necessity. If deemed to be universities are given the liberalisation to implement courses along with the number of students, which would be a great help.”

Teaching cannot just survive on higher education, the school and colleges need to build for that. Education cannot be differentiated at different levels and it has to be one education policy throughout for development.