 Thank you, Mohit and Dhanashree. Really delighted to be here for the next 30 minutes with a really awesome panel of experts and thought leaders in their respective space. The topic that we are discussing today is building talent and skills for coding the New India. There is no doubt that India is the tech capital of the world and fueling this leadership is our brain power and human talent. The sector is not only generating huge employment but is also adding thousands of successful entrepreneurs every single day. It's no wonder that the share of digital technology investments into India will be 60% in 2025 from just 10% what it was in 2014. So while we have a robust and flourishing tech sector but our assets would be our biggest risks as well. A recent study reports that 63% Indian companies have shortage of talent primarily in IT and engineering services. We have seen many tech companies moving or starting to set up centers in other countries as well. And at this point I want to turn to our experts for their thoughts. I welcome all of you but my first question is to Amit Ranjan who co-founded SlideShare in 2006. Was it COO till it was acquired by LinkedIn and later Amit joined the Government's Digital India program and has been architecting some of the very impactful programs like Digital Locker having huge impacts of millions of results. Welcome it. Thank you. You wear multiple hats. You have founded companies. You are creating products investing in a lot of companies right now that I know. So what are your thoughts about the talent demand and supply gap that we have? And what are you guiding startups to navigate this gap? Right, right. So you know the whole issue or problem of hiring the right people for your organization whether it is a startup, whether it is a government or whether it is a large corporation. That tends to have tremendous mind share in terms of your daily operational activities. And it kind of assumes even more importance in case of startups. And I remember way back in my early days of SlideShare one of the lessons that I learned was that startup founders are nothing but glorified recruiters. So 50% of the job of any founder is just making sure that you can get the right talent into your organization and you can train them and you can actually work with them. So my advice always to startups or to young companies is to kind of whenever you are thinking about recruitment, whenever you are thinking about people whenever you are thinking about talent I think it is instructive to kind of broaden the horizon a little bit and not just think in terms of the recruitment or the hiring function but to broaden it and to think of it as the people function, right? You know Henry Ford had this great saying almost 100 years back when he said that the most important asset in any organization is its people and it is so surprising that the people do not show up on the balance sheet, right? So if you go by that saying that the people is the people function the people asset is what really determines the future of any organization and so you got to think of the talent problem as essentially a people problem, right? What you are trying to do is not just hire people not just kind of get them into the organization but what you are trying to do is to build the right culture the culture that you have in your organization should kind of become like the talent magnet in the ecosystem that you are in. There will be people who will be working in your organization they will be leaving the organization, they will be going out, they will be talking about it Social media is great at amplifying some of these experiences and messages people talk about their experiences on social media platforms they write blogs, they post it, they tell their friends so what you really want is to kind of at the foundational level focus on building the right culture in the organization so that the people who you attract, who you hire essentially kind of amplify the message around about your company in the external world and that in turn kind of builds some kind of a magnetic force in attracting the best people into the company so once you do that, that is when you will be successful in getting a steady stream of the best people who will say, hey I want to actually come and work in this organization because it's not just a one-time problem recruitment is not just getting people one shot or at one time and then kind of moving in recruitment is a constant thing, there will be people who will be coming people would leave, you need to replenish them as the organization grows, you'll see that startups essentially outgrow themselves start from a zero base, they go to 1, then they go to 5, then they go to 10 50, 100, at every stage of the journey you are essentially reliving and rebuilding the organization you will need different kinds of skill sets, you will need different kinds of people so the key thing here and the message that I want to kind of leave the audience with is that don't think of the talent or the recruitment function just at the hiring or at the recruitment level think of it at a broader people level think in terms that what does it take to build the right culture and the culture that you build in your organization, the culture that you inculcate kind of should become like the magnet of attracting the best people towards your organization and once you have a channel of those people coming in then obviously you need to kind of set up the right systems and processes so that you can actually hire them and then you can retain them and motivate them towards a long and a fulfilling career Wonderful, that was really really insightful Thank you for your thoughts Before going to the second question I'm sure all of us have heard about AICTE I have been personally involved with this institution for the last 15 years and I must say today AICTE is completely transformed it's one of the most dynamic regulatory bodies in our country I have seen the council members and everybody really open to partner with every stakeholder they want to imbibe and share the best practices and most importantly they are creating the impact that we need for empowering one of the largest education sector in the world and truly the person who is subtly driving all this goodness and change is here with us today Really honoured to have you Dr. Boudha Chandrasekhar My heartiest welcome to you Sir, you know, I think we have talked a lot and we often see these reports about the talent gap that we have in our country So what is and I know that government is taking this agenda very very seriously So if you could, you know, spread some light on your thoughts on what actions government is taking at their level to really bridge this gap Thank you, Tiraj and all Github team members I'm really delighted to be here As you know, under making India initiative and performing centre skills India has received more than 375 billion US dollars as an investment in last 8 years which means that India is going to be a global manufacturing hub but empowering the 7 crore higher education students and recent graduates to access the industry-aligned courses and skilling and upskilling is the key for Atman-Erbar Bharat So this continuous upskilling process is going to be a driving force for making India the global digital talent hub So interestingly, if you see the recent India skill reports in 2019 and 2020 it states one very important interesting ingredient saying that only 46% of the students are found to be employable I think, you know, we must accept that the old national education policy is more towards creating a worker than an innovator, researcher or a startup or an entrepreneur That's the reason we have very few entrepreneurs and you know, the startup culture is not grown because that's the way the old education policy was defined But now the new education policy with the help of this new national education policy 2020 under the guidance of Honorable Minister Dharmendra Pradhan Ji we are transforming the school level to a college level and a university into a technology and skill power houses by implementing interactive digital platforms because still now the old education policy used to assume that every student is same and used to deliver the content of the similar content in a similar format to all the students So as you know, every student is unique in nature So for them, the way they learn is different So what we did on the national education policy 2020 we started customizing, adopting and personalizing the educational system so that the student will adopt the content whichever he likes Let's say I'm pretty good in learning through videos So I will get the content more on the video side and if you are pretty much interested on the research side then you will get more research oriented material and that your understanding level on the subject will increase and another main ingredient is for the national education policy 2020 is it has more focus on the skill based education and we want to eliminate or reduce the gap between the industry requirements and the academia because still now what is happening the student comes out of the knowledge coming out of the college with knowledge and without any practical experience of the industry So he don't have any communication skills he don't have a professional skills he don't have a practical approach he don't know what is happening in the industry So the minute he jumps into the industry he is not fitting into the industry requirements So now from the eighth standard onwards we started implementing the vocational courses we started doing more hands-on training we are doing a cross specialization which is very very important and we are doing a mentoring sessions giving more employable based opportunities like internship opportunities where the student works with more than 3 to 4 industries slash MNCs you know when they are in college and once he comes out of the college if he wants to he is interested then he can do apprenticeship opportunity where he can work with the industry So we are doing all this various initiatives in order to empower our students and our intention is very very simple we want to give only the best of the best to the students faculty as well as to the industry as we see that is using under make in India process we are getting investments not only on IT, VPM and KPOs because you know that is where our strongest area but now we are getting investments on auto components automobiles, aviation, biotechnology chemicals, food processing, leather, media, railways roads and highways, renewable energy I mean what it really means is our opportunities for our students are huge so that is where we have taken a pledge that we will prepare all our young minds for future so we have identified 30 technologies which can rule the world for next 15 to 20 years so from artificial intelligence to IoT to blockchain to big data, automation, robotics you know immersive AR, VR, media, cloud computing you know I am just naming few health technologies wireless technologies, touch technologies quantum computing etc, edge computing and working on new sensor based proximity location based so we have identified such 30 technologies and started skilling and upskilling our students so that they are going to be industry ready so these are the couple of initiatives the beauty of the entire new education policy is that you know we have understood the requirements of the industry and fine tuning our educational policies using advanced technologies in order to skill and upskill our students and faculty for their better future so this is the way we are transforming because you know till date we are teaching but now we want to transform till now we are giving an education we want to empower we want to lead the entire thing using 5 pillars of national education policy which call as access, quality, equity affordability and accountability so what happens is this will create the best of the best capacity building the human resources you know the entire global world so that is where we are focusing and this is the way we are fulfilling the requirement and I am sure now recently if you see couple of companies started using our internships as well as apprenticeship platforms and I am happy to share that in last one and a half year we are able to give more than 18 lakh internship opportunities and few of them got retuted with various MNCs and big organizations for a better package and few even got opportunities in abroad so we are so happy that this model is working and this model is outcome based we moved from a road method on this to outcome based we strongly feel that this outcome based approach of national education policy will definitely take our country to a greater heights absolutely sir and thank you thank you so much for that information I have personally seen the impact on students of the internship program that we are fighting it is phenomenal I think that is what is really going to bridge the gap that we call about in the academy and in the industry so thank you very much our next panelist is someone whom I have been watching from several years he is the CEO of India's biggest developer community company having a community of over 1 lakh developers and tech enthusiasts Rohit Sardana from ReSQL where I recently came across a report which mentioned about 260 million jobs will be replaced or augmented and this indicates a huge need for upskilling and re-skilling talent something what Dr. Buddha was just mentioning what are you hearing from your customers especially on the corporate side or startups or MNCs what are their requirements what are they asking you to do thank you Dheeraj for this opportunity we have been working with tech companies with startups for a while now and all of us have this need of scaling re-skilling, upskilling their existing workforce and that is something that is good for the ecosystem because if I were to put myself in other shoes hiring as Amit also said is a problem for us and then retaining also is a problem for us the size and scale of various startups so there is a lot of emphasis over $100 being pumped by Amazon to skill their 10,000 workforces and so on and so forth so large companies have already started re-skilling their existing workforces startups are also now slowly but gradually catching up so we see a lot of these hackathons and knowledge sessions being organized by large unicorn startups currently to engage with existing workforces add knowledge to them add a layer of learning technology to them changing their field of or domain of work inside their organization helping them acquire more skills as part of the same organization and so on and so forth so amazing work is being done at the back of supported by AICTE at the college level but the change at the moment or the ball has started rolling in terms of people putting in a lot of emphasis on skilling and re-skilling as part of any organization and as part of retaining and training the existing workforces Amit, I'll come back to you and something that me individually I think I'm sure all of the Indians are really proud about which is the innovation happening in India especially in the government space we talk about Aadhar, we talk about UPI we talk about Digilock or Coven so many and you know whenever I go and talk to my colleagues and friends outside India about the impact of UPI or the safety and security I have because I have an app anything contract tracing during COVID really has my head UPI you have been involved in many of those personally and you have built some of them on your own we obviously want to see a lot of more innovation coming out of India which impacts the billions of people in the country and outside the country also what is going to be your guidance to our young audience here on how do we build such kind of products and platforms so I think you are absolutely you know bang on when you say that India has really been at the forefront of building the citizen centric, modern age, new age technology oriented platforms that have a direct impact on you know on governance systems and whether it is you know Aadhar or it is UPI or it is Coven or it is Digilocker and there is a whole lot of others as well I have not been fortunate enough to have been positioned in the ministry of IT where I was directly involved with Digilocker and the others I have kind of had the opportunity to see and experience from very close quarters and going back to the point that we are discussing here and Rohit talked about in terms of re-skilling and the kind of new skill sets that you would require in this new age I think the same applies to the government as well one of my you know one of the things that I experienced when I started working in the government way back in 2015 is that the government is you know an entity which over the years it obviously runs the company the entire country and the way it has been doing that one of the ways it has been doing that has become really good at managing projects but there is a little bit of a re-learning or a re-skilling that might be required in this situation because a lot of these technology platforms actually require you to actually unlearn a bit of what you do in project management and kind of think in terms of products and platforms right and that is something which might be a little bit of a new thing that you know people inside the government would need to imbibe and so you know my role essentially when I joined the government has been kind of the biggest role if you ask me obviously you know kind of build these technology platforms you've taken them to the citizens they are now running and you know addressing customer citizen pain points every day but if you ask me what has been my biggest contribution or the thing that I've actually tried to orchestrate and fight the government it is actually to help the government understand the value and the importance of building these products and these platforms and to kind of try to bring about a little bit of change or a re-think or a re-skilling in terms of what they are best at because they're coming from a very strong project management background and now they have to kind of you know acquire these skills and actually learn these new things and run and build these platforms and these products so couple of things come to my mind which have been you know very useful here one is that you know you've got to start thinking about India's problems from first principles right I mean I had as part of SlideShare I had the opportunity to build a globally a global scale product you know which was initially targeted at the power users of Silicon Valley but once I came and started working in the government of India while I learned a lot of things from that experience I also had to kind of you know while I was borrowing some of the best practices but I had to put on a very India specific ad an Indian way of thinking and that is very important and that's something that's a phenomenon that plays out in different you know in different ways is that India needs solutions which are very India centric you might borrow ideas you might get inspired by what others are doing across the world but you got to kind of you know take those ideas and then implement it in a very Indian specific way so thinking from first principles you know thinking about what kind of solutions India needs from grounds up I think the Aadhaar ecosystem one of the really powerful things that it has done to the country is that it's made people realize the value of the API architecture and the API systems Aadhaar was always built up as an API which meant that it kind of solves the digital identity problem and once it does that it also kind of you know enables other products and services to kind of be built on top of it be it UPI or you know Digilocker and Esign and there's a host of other services so the API architecture and the API way of building products and services is something which has kind of started getting deeply ingrained inside the government and that to my mind has been one of the absolutely fantastic developments that you know because government systems traditionally tend to be built as you know stand alone and they are siloed so once you kind of you know get them to actually talk to each other using APIs and that you know that change can be really transformational. That's right and I so much agree with you Amit in fact I have been interviewing a lot of candidates in the recent past and whenever there's a candidate who has a government experience or has worked with the government or has seen the kind of work happening there they talk with a lot of pride and passion so I think I think all of us as citizens of India have a lot to contribute back and not to benefit out of the innovation happening there so I think students who are on listening to us I think there's something in for all of you. So I'll come back to you Dr. Buddha and I think all of us many of us have discussed this challenge that technology specifically changes you know people say that technology changes with a blink of an eye how easy or difficult it is to keep the education ecosystem in pace with those changes because that's what we always complain that you know what we do in real life and what we are being taught there is a huge difference what challenges do you see as a regulator as the administrator? Yeah I mean I myself is a technologist so I'm very much interested to answer them because when I work for various companies in US and various other countries what they realized is our country is more transactional based and technology changes the way we interact and reflect on ways we use technology in communication, collaboration and critical thinking and to formulate a creative solution also I mean see the way we have used technology to distribute the COVID vaccinations to every who can corner of this country that's the beauty of a Juga of what Indians can do see none of the country is able to do that that is the best example which we can project to the entire globe so coming back to the national education policy 2020 we are enabled the national education policy with advanced technologies and it is agile in nature so we basically work in a very smaller life cycle project so that we can accommodate the change much faster because the change management is critical for any project so as a technologist project manager I understand that implementing projects within time and in faster phases is very very important with advanced technologies like example now we are coming up with NDR H for the higher education we are digitizing the entire higher education but using a enterprise architecture which is open agile in nature and we are creating open API based methods because as you know India 2.0 architecture has open APIs exposed for the critical infrastructure so we are utilizing that and we are remodeling and connecting all the educational digital entities with it example there is a concept called ABC the academic bank of credit so there we are using the application of of the various existing other based authentication we are using DG locker etc so it is a I would like to say that the way we strategize the entire higher education as well as the school education sector is to more aligned towards the existing process and the technologies all is in place at the same time we are creating a 2.0 APIs so that we can not only consume the data from the other side we can give the data so that they can utilize so the thought process is just to replicate the model what we are on the NHA so in NHA what they did they have created a health ID and you know from there they are just trying to control I mean you know flow the information digital information from a patient to a doctor to a network right in a similar fashion here we are going to create a student ID and that student ID as well as institute ID and the infrastructure ID of the institute all these three together going to work and transfer the information from one place to another place with help of these open APIs and enterprise architecture so this is the way we strategized it and I completely understand and you know and the kind of re-engineering of our economics and societies are happening with help of this digitization and technologies so we are keeping that in mind and we are adopting all the new technologies example we even went to a digital twinning so recently we did one experiment from the one of the German based company they have the physical mission in Germany we have taken a digital twin of it given it to more than 600 to 700 students of various colleges they worked on the digital twin they tweaked the models and they created best of the best models out of it and which we produced the outcome solution back to the German based company so we are you know trying to use all the advanced technologies like AR we are digital twinning and trying to give the best to our students as well as faculty I mean we are not only concentrating on students we are even focusing on faculty we are giving them more advanced technologies faculty development programs so that they can disseminate the best knowledge to the students and at the same time as government initiatives like software technology park export oriented units the special economic zones and recently we opened up the foreign direct investment also for example in the budget if you see right we have said you know the anyone any foreign entity can have an investment in the form of center of excellence or a startup within the institutes or universities itself so we are opened up and you know and lots of universities from various other countries they are interested to establish their entities within our colleges itself so I am imagining kind of a college park or a Stanford model you know where you have companies residing within your institute or university so that the student on the morning session goes to the college and after the session he will work for the company so that by the time he comes out you know we want him to get empowerment on the both the sides you know one on the degree he has and the second side you know he has a practical knowledge of working with 3 to 4 companies and I completely understand and agree because I myself was a software developer even yesterday night till late night I am writing code so as India is a land of software developers you know it is an estimated that around 4 to 5 million developers are there in India so I have 4 to 5 million brothers and sisters so I you know and it is ranked third after China and US and I am sure very soon you know we will even cross China and US because the kind of a movement what I see the kind of an encouragement we are doing and the kind of a pattern our students are following you know they are very much interested on web 3.0 and they are working aggressively and they are trying out and we are giving the platforms this is where I see that GitHub comes into picture and I would like to thank GitHub for giving this amazing opportunity to our students which I you know I know this is not any promotional activity but I would like to share my personal experience with all of you because I see that you know there is lots of projection saying that we are good to have more than 30 billion yearly revenue and Indian software product industry by 2025 you know by NASCOM etc. but I see this in a different way you know India is aiming to become a global supplier for software digital technology solutions period so this is where the GitHub comes into picture and recently I had an interaction and my Honorable Minister G spoke about you know why don't you teach ABCDFG to higher education students I said sir they already know because you know they studied about ABCDFG in school they said no no no I am talking about A means artificial intelligence B means blockchain C means cyber security B means data analytics and intelligence G means electronics F means faster coding maybe you know in his words maybe faster coding it means no code you know approach and G is GitHub you know so this is where we see the GitHub is very very important for our national education policy because it is a hosting provider platform which is giving an opportunity to all our students and faculty to control and manage their projects by utilizing the version of version controlling and collaboration because working individual is different and working together is different they all are working together see which was lagging in old education policy so we are utilizing the GitHub platform and we are asking them to work together as a community because I see GitHub as a very immensely powerful community I think and it's an open source platform you know this is where we are utilizing I mean you know we see the way the Minister of Education is working now it is only as I said it wants to give only the best of the best of the students and the faculty we are encouraging them saying that you know try utilizing these platforms now we have a very powerful student community but that student community resides on GitHub and we are so happy and I was recently reading a numbers I was amazed to see that the kind of a community you have is more than 73 million and with 4 million organizations I mean what a beautiful platform it is and this is where our students are gaining insights you know they are learning they are doing coding and they are using student offerings which you have given in a real time experience and there is lots of various development tools which you have given for free of course I would like to thank all GitHub and GitHub partners for it and I am not doing any kind of a PR here but I am sharing my experience recently I visited couple of colleges there when I interacted with them you know on the center of excellence groups we have created in various places for innovation and research I am so happy to see that they all are using this GitHub something called campus you know you have a campus you know where global campus I don't exactly remember the name I think it's a global campus they are the students, teachers and they are utilizing the tools to generate the next generation softwares and it's a blazing fast you know I really love the way it is so fast as to the night where I am pulling the code as a developer I was amazing the kind of a fastness it has shown and the code spaces as a collaborative environment the last but not least you know I am just going on and on but the security you know what you have because I see sometimes what happens you know we will just write some secret or you know some kind of a secure code unsecurely on GitHub and push it and what the beauty thing of GitHub is it automatically detects and solves the secrets committed to the repose you know this is a beautiful thing you know I don't know who invented this but the kind of a contribution they are doing to the software society is just infinite and the project coordination is last thing because as a project manager I need to manage so I sometimes manage this using all the tasks using this you know management tool which you have so last but not least I see that the large number of Indian developers are major players in the software ecosystem and I see that the future belongs to India with a great share of work from different parts of the world I see that Indians are going to get settled in various places as of now you know when I used to work for Microsoft and various other organizations I see 30% are Indians you know on the software side but now I envision in a different way I see to 40% experts on the automobile industry on the oil and gas industry on the teaching side I think you know these all are possible because we have opened up the doors and the national education policy is fully concentrating on innovation on the startup ecosystem and I am so happy to see that more than 7.5 lakh startups and they are very well working and working together as a team and trying to do something which is really amazing I see someone is working on a gene technologies which I never imagined that will happen from Indian land I mean that kind of a technological advancements and skills and knowledge what our Indian students are displaying and they are not looking only to become a job seeker they are looking towards job creators and I thank GitHub for giving this kind of opportunities to all our students and if you have any questions or concerns as I already mentioned the national education policy is open we are ready to accept any change which is betterment for our country and we are so happy to be part of you know various other organizations we started working with other organizations trying to understand their requirements you know we are giving our intents to them and they all are working for various organizations and creating a building not only for MNCs we are creating capacity building for government organizations also thank you so much I can't I don't have words to actually thank you enough for your kind words and I think it's great honor for us to receive first-hand feedback from you not only as a user of GitHub but also when you see others in the education ecosystem using and benefiting out of GitHub all I can say is that we as GitHub are really committed to being here we are honored to actually be involved in most of the projects whether it is CoVin, whether it is the health ID at NHA, and we really want to be involved in the student ID project. All our support and everything will be at your disposal. Thank you and I think we are just running out of time Rohit I have my last question to you and that's going to be very very interesting for all the students what are the top skills that you see in demand? Of course cloud cloud has suddenly become very big lot of job opportunities in cloud artificial intelligence machine learning I'm just seeing some of the skills that are top of my my DevOps that's where the jobs are happening data science including data analytics data visualization cyber security again non tech UI UX in a broader sense, mobile app development and so on and so forth. See there's some of the skills or sectors or technologies wherein there are a lot of job opportunities that have come up especially in last 6 to 12 months and I think this will continue to remain these trends will continue to remain for maybe next 12 to 24 months all right I think we'll wrap up here I want to thank all of you Dr. Buddha, Amit, Rohit really thank you I'm sure the participants have learned a lot in our discussion and my session to all the participants will be to engage with our panelists on the social media I know all of them are very active so whether it's LinkedIn or Twitter on their behalf I'm inviting you to engage with them thank you so much I will give back to the host now