BENGALURU: It's time the government stopped giving cycles to students and started giving ipad and laptops instead. Also, do a DBT (direct benefit transfer) to pay the broadband fees, said Arundhati Bhattacharya, CEO & Chairperson, Salesforce India and former Chairperson of the State Bank of India on Tuesday.
Talking at the launch of the collaboration between Manipal Global Education Services and Salesforce to launch a skill development academy for graduates and young professionals, Bhattacharya said that the (DBT to students) suggestion was made to the government already and she intends on making it till it takes root.
At one point you needed cycles to go to school, but today you can do a lot of skilling just by sitting at home, if you have these two things, she added.
Bhattacharya agreed that there is definitely a huge need among the less privileged, because they dont have access to online material as the well to do. It's because of the bandwidth problem, as it is not the same across the country. The second is many do not have highend devices for a good experience for what is coming through, she said.
T. V. Mohandas Pai, Chairman, Manipal Global Education Services believed that the access to smartphone problem is getting solved across India. "We have one billion mobile connections in india, of which 250 million are feature phones, but with jio coming out with low cost smart phone with installment plan, they hope to make these 250 million plan to make smartphones -- hence all barring young children will have access to smartphone, maybe 85-90 per cent," he said.
He believed that there is a huge demand for skilled forces, and anyone who is underprivileged will have access and that will be done by deliberate intervention by of corporates, government and the demand.
"Free software training available. The demand is so large that (from the industry) you cannot confine yourself to top 100 colleges -- today out of 3500 engineering colleges, people are going to 3000 colleges. Out of 51,000 colleges in India for higher education, people are reaching out to 30,000 colleges. Skill development programme is spreading its wings all across -- all governments have jobs as key objectives," Pai said.
He encouraged the idea of learning Coding at school level where students could pick the necessary skill up easily, in addition to art, writing, reading, and arithmetic. Coding is the skill you need, added Pai advocating a new slogan from Roti Kapda Makan aur Bandwidth to Roti Kapda Makan and Coding.
Pai believed that in the next decade, the greatest job demand will be at the top of the pyramid -- people who are experts in technology because that's where the innovation starts and we need to create a huge ecosystem.
We just have 500 PhD's in computer science while we need 5000 of them a year, we have 15-20 thousand masters while we need 100 thousand masters a year, he opined.