From the next academic year, technical education institutions in India are likely to have new syllabus tailor-made as per industry needs with skill improvement courses for pass-outs, before joining the industry.
Damodaran Acharya, Chairman of the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), told Hindustan Times that entire course curriculum is being revamped. “Our emphasis is to reduce the core content and increase basic science and management part in the syllabus,” he said, while adding that the students will learn more than just technical aspects of the course.
The government was forced to look at the syllabus following NASSCOM report that only 30-40 per cent of graduates from Indian technical education institutes are worth employing. The government initiated dialogue with NASSCOM and a committee was formed to deliberate on the issue.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had asked educationists to improve basic science content in courses to improve students’ interest towards basic science. The work on new syllabus for 10 different streams is almost complete and it would be ready by March this year.
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“The syllabus would be circulated to universities for adoption,” Acharya said, but added that the”choice is theirs”. His advice to the universities is that they should adopt the curriculum, as it has been prepared after examining best practices in technical educational institutions in the world.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
