As all eyes are on Union Budget 2022 that is all set to be announced on February 1, 2022, Digital Learning spoke to a few industry experts about their expectations from the Union Budget 2022.
Thousands and thousands of crores, is being pumped into the education and skill development ecosystem every year. Just the budgetary allocation towards Skill development alone is over Rs.21,000 Crores in the last ten years.
Having invested several crores over the years, it leads to few questions like;
A. What are the tangible outcomes?
B. What is the positive impact on the economy?
C. Has the spending addressed reducing unemployment or un-employability issues?
If we deeply dive into figuring out the answers for these questions, the answer remains gloomy or without enough data to prove the outcome.
Having said this, I expect the following ten expectations being addressed in the budget 2022, which should also spell out the outcome;
1. The spending on skill development with focus on engineering skills remains negligible, which needs attention and more spent.
2. Content and Delivery are the key to effective training, the government should allocate a considerable amount towards content standardisation and E-learning content delivery with the best of Subject Matter Experts (SME), which can elevate the delivery standards and also address scalability.
3. Training on E waste management focusing at the Bottom of the Pyramid and an ecosystem should take care of the challenges that are emerging out of poor eWaste Management practises in India.
4. Online skilling portal with Content/ training accessible to all should be available.
5. Industry should be incentivised when they hire candidates with Sector Skill Council certifications and tag this to the PLA scheme criteria.
6. Encourage industry for NAPS adoption and enhance scheme outlay.
7. More focus on Center of Excellence tagging to the cluster based development should be the right approach.
8. Skill Gap Analysis was last done in the year 2011-12, which is outdated and investment should be done with an outlook for next 5 years.
9. Focus on future skills and training aligned to New Age skills like Smart Manufacturing, Additive Manufacturing, Industrial IoT, VR/AR, MR, AI, etc.
10. The skill assessment patterns with more emphasis on practical elements rather than the theoretical components.
Hope these elements are looked upon in the forthcoming budget and a positive impact on the spending of Public money towards the growth of the economy and the society is addressed through this budget.
