NEW DELHI: The private sector needs to be an "early warning system" to forecast future skills requirement of India's economy, with a deeper involvement not only as a training partner but also as financial and employment stakeholder with regard to future skilling, Minister of state for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Friday.
Industry must forecast the skills that would be required in the country over the next 1-3 years, and work closely with skilling partners and government agencies to ensure that leading courses are developed, designed, accredited, certified and available in those areas, said Chandrasekhar, who is also Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.
Speaking at the launch of FutureSkills Prime - a Meity-Nasscom initiative to reskill and upskill professionals in emerging technologies- the Minister noted that India has a large training network that delivers programmes all the way from entry-level skills to specialised skills.
"...we have to have the private sector be the early warning system of what skills are required by our economy...I think this is an important area to characterise the partnership between government and the industry," Chandrasekhar pointed out.
Calling for a deeper institutional involvement of the industry, a model that has worked well in many areas, the Minister hoped that the private sector involvement would be significant in areas of skilling and upskilling too.
The government is firmly-committed to skill development agenda, ensuring supply of skilled manpower, strengthening training framework, skill up-gradation, and building new skill capabilities.
"In the context of Government's commitment, for example, in the digital future skills (it) is amply evident. We have committed about Rs 450 crore of capital to it. That is not a small amount of contribution...a large part of that is remaining unspent," he said.
Industry body NASSCOM has contributed some amount of capital and is contributing, through the private sector partners, with regards to courseware.
"...but we need to get private sector much more deeper involved and I mean as not just as training stakeholders but as financial and employment stakeholders," the Minister said.
The skilling ecosystem and its `reimagined framework' is not only about entry-level skilling but rather about "dynamic ladder of skilling, reskilling and upskilling".
While `ab initio' skilling is easy to measure in terms of employment, reskilling and upskilling should focus on career progression as well as employment.
The universe is coming together to give the tech ecosystem a huge opportunity for growth, Chandrasekhar said observing that new education policy, the skilling paradigm, government partnership, and rapid pace of technology adoption, and digitalization globally all represent a `Y2K' like moment.
"This is really an inflection point for us. We have to seize the moment as an inflection point. The next two to three years, we've got to get our act together very smartly," he said.
As India moves up the value chain and gets into new areas of Artificial Intelligence and emerging technologies, the competition landscape would become "much more intense", he cautioned.
"The competition intensity and therefore the skilling intensity is really part of the formula for success that we should be focusing on," Chandrasekhar said.