 Okay. Welcome everyone. Appreciate everybody being here today. I do want to let you know in advance that I have my iPhone here and I'm going to place it right here and if I look at it I'm not actually checking my tweets or text. I'm actually just making sure that we stay on time even though we're starting a little bit late. So I want you to be aware of all that. So I do welcome you and welcome the panelists who I'll introduce in a few minutes to our session on which comes first, employment or employability. And this is a big topic and we'll set the context of it up here shortly. But we're going to look at and have discussions around educational reform. We're going to look around how innovation and entrepreneurship play a role. And we're going to look about supply and demand and the role of business and government and the teaming that needs to be done around all that. We've got many questions that we're going to take a look at and we're certainly going to open it up to the audience. So please in advance think about questions that you would like to ask the panelists. But some of the questions that we're going to look at is about the education system and how it needs to be reformed here in India. We're going to look about innovation and entrepreneurship and how that can enable better educational curriculums and turn out with better outcomes in terms of the skill sets that the Indian youth has. And the role of business in terms of supply and demand, making those matches and how business and government should team together to fight the paradox of the talent that we have here. Just to continue to set the stage for a second, it wasn't much more than two months ago when Prime Minister Modi talked about make in India. And I know that all of you have heard that phrase, but I'm halfway around the world and I heard it almost instantaneously when it happened. And I continue to hear that consistent theme along with the goal of generating 100 million jobs in the manufacturing sector. Now that's an admirable statement. That's an admirable vision and that's an admirable goal. But it does have its challenges. So right now in India, there's a workforce of about 500 million people. It varies a little bit depending upon the reports you choose to read. But approximately about one million people are added to that workforce every month. But the paradox is that when you read reports and you talk to executives who work here and lead businesses in India, whether they are Indian companies or MNCs, you consistently hear over half or up to two thirds of them are frustrated by the challenge of finding the right people with the right skills to fill the open roles that they have. But the scenario is slightly more complex. If any of you happen to read the special report in The Economist, it was an early edition in October, it talked about the world economy and technology. And we all know that disruptive technology or digital technology disrupts businesses. That's for sure. You can read about it every day. It's been going on for many, many years. But what's new and what we don't really often talk about is how digital disruption impacts employment and jobs. So we've got a further complication with that. And that's going to be the heart of our discussion. We're going to look at the answer to the talent paradox here in India. But let's be clear, it's not only to India, to many mature countries like the country that I come from the United States, we have the same talent paradox. We're going to look at innovation and entrepreneurship. So with all this, I'd like to introduce our panelists here. And I think that many of you know this talented group up here. And if you happen to see their CVs, the accomplishments go on for pages. But I can't really spend that much time introducing you. So Shabana is chairperson for Editorial Director for HT Media, the mass media company and publisher of The Hinton's and Times, as well as the business newspaper, The Mint. Nick Dirks is the 10th chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, an internationally renowned historian and anthropologist. He is a leader in higher education and well known for his commitment and Abiskey for accessible high quality education. We've got Uday Tadek, who is the executive director and executive vice chairman and managing director of Kotak Mahindra Bank and its principal founder. Over the years, he has helped build the company into a full financial services group with many of its businesses among the leading players in their respective fields. Arun Ahuti is the founder and CEO of Mentor Together, founded in 2009. Mentor Together operates formal youth mentoring programs in India aimed at providing disadvantaged youth and support through volunteer mentorship and coaching. And Minister Armani, welcome. The minister was appointed to the Maudhati government in 2004. Previously, she served in the Rajesh Shaba, India's upper house of Parliament elected in 2011. Now, what's known, I'm sure to all of you, but relatively new to me, is that the minister was a well-known actress before, so congratulations. So, I'd like to get started, and the way that we're going to work here is that we're going to go through a round of questions. And my first set of questions are going to be focused on asking the panelists to articulate the challenge that we have so that we're well-grounded with the challenge and the understanding of that challenge. And then I'm going to switch gears a little bit and ask them a little bit about the solutions and particularly solutions from their lens. As you can tell by the CVs, they all come from a different part and see the problem of the talent paradox in a slightly different way. So as co-chair, I want to start with Shobana. HT Media has launched several educational initiatives that help students prepare for exams, choose careers and improve performance. So Shobana, can you talk about some of the challenges that you saw that caused you to create these initiatives? We found that people keep talking about India's demographic dividend. India has such a large pool of people joining the workforce every year, and yet there was a talent conundrum. There were people without jobs and there were jobs without people. And if you want to actually reap dividends and grow at the seven or eight percent, we actually need to create many more jobs and give a fillip to the manufacturing sector as well. We felt there was a huge scope in terms of providing appropriate education to the workforce, including working professionals. And HT Media saw in that an opportunity and actually started something for working professionals who could not invest in education, higher education and now cannot give up their jobs and leave and go on to education. So we started something which is, of course, there for freshmen as well, but also for working professionals to try and bring about a greater match because today there's an educational employment mismatch. And to try and address that. So we started the Bridge School of Management which actually looks at the entire management training in a completely different way. It's a more hybrid model and frankly you spoke about certain disruptive technologies that perhaps might be required. And I strongly believe that in India to actually meet the challenges, we need to bring in something that is far more scalable, that is affordable and that of course has quality. And to my mind, a more hybrid model or a digital model that allows you to scale up would be a very appropriate fit. And the Bridge School actually tries that even in the U.S. if you see the growth in the state and the private universities who are actually now catering to working professionals, the growth for a more flexible online model or a hybrid model which is online and face-to-face is 11% as opposed to just a 1% growth in the conventional model in terms of the offtake. So the Bridge School actually tries to cater to this section with a hybrid model which is largely online and partially face-to-face. And of course there are other properties as well like you spoke about HD campus and we have a counseling, a career counseling cell which has a fit with about 45,000 universities in India where we try and match what a person's requirement is, what their aptitude is with the most appropriate fit. We also counsel them, we try and get them to see which way their career opportunity lies. After that, we have something called the Shine Board which actually prepares people for employment. Again, there's a tie-up with NSDC where we help them take online courses for skilling. But more importantly, try and again bring about some kind of appropriate fit between the inherent talents of a person and the opportunities that are there and try and upskill people. So really getting at the scalability and affordability is out there. Uday, the Code Tech Mahindra produced a report recently called The Great Unskilled. Can we fix it? Can you tell the audience a little bit about that and also the challenges that you saw that caused you to write that and the challenges that you're trying to fix? Thank you, Gary. As I look at the situation in India, the solution to long-term employment and employability lies in civil society and not in business. And what do I mean by this? One of the most important fundamental changes are required in the mindset of Indians where we first start getting back to respecting teachers. I mean, we go to our history. The guru was the ultimate for a student. Somewhere down the road, in the pursuit of ends-over means, the teaching profession has lost some of the respect from civil society which is the starting point of getting it back. The second key area of change in mindset is over the last many years in the past, the entire focus of the government was on hardware. They were creating more school buildings, more edifices. But what about the software? And therefore, if we are going to make a long-term sustainable change in India, it has to start from the roots of civil society where a teacher is back to being one of the most respected people. The second is the whole area of making sure that we get the software into schools and not disproportionately focus on hardware. And third, which is a correlation to this, is the starting point of fixing this is schools. And we really need to get good teachers, good software, changed curriculum, meaningful outcomes as the starting point of making the change towards employability. And that I think is key. Certainly, many of the things that were said about the situation in India certainly apply to many of the more advanced mature nations like mine, as Nick knows, so we welcome all these comments. Renuti, your organization works with disadvantaged youth who benefit from a steady presence for helping and coaching and mentoring around career goals and soft skills like collaboration, language, interpersonal skills. So I'd like to know some of the challenges that you saw that caused you and prompted you to form mentor together. It was actually a way to pay forward some of the very fortuitous mentorship that I felt I ended up receiving in my life which allowed me to take some significant career choices. I'd like to use the time frame of adolescence to adulthood and that transition that young people have to make, critical to which is really preparing for employability and being a working professional. And I'd like to use that time frame to really talk about three periods of opportunity that I see, where probably the fact that we're not addressing that opportunity creates the problem. The first one is actually the age of about 13 to 15 itself, so earlier adolescence. And I think what happens as young people are maturing then is the ideas of autonomy, responsibility, initiative taking, finding your own identity. That becomes very critical to young people. And where we're missing out on that is the link that formal education has to all of these ideas and values is missing. So A, young people don't see the ability to use these ideas of critical thinking, independence, autonomy in formal education. And secondly, the link of the relevance of formal education then to these ideas that are coming up to them is lost. Very importantly, research shows that the ideas and the orientation that people have on these values, like responsibility, motivation, initiative, at age 15 to 18, can significantly predict their ability to use this at age 25 to 30. And that's the age when we're expecting them to use it in employability, but the founding blocks of this are at age 15 to 18. And by missing that link to how formal education can help them build that, I think we lose that opportunity there. At about 15 to 18, the other, the second time frame that I see a huge opportunity is to help young people make informed career choices or the decisions about discipline, which discipline to choose, the themes, the topics. Good enough career psychology, which I'm not an expert of, but I've had the opportunity to understand, says that the age should be, there should be a balanced amount of self assessment of your aptitudes and skills, some amount of awareness of the opportunities that are available in terms of what choices you have, as well as right amount of guidance and mentorship. And it should not be skewed unfairly towards any of these. What I see in the kind of choices we make is unfairly skewed. So in my city of Bangalore, it's spatial. Every child believes that success is IT. Some other times, it's skewed in terms of what gender tells you to believe your choice should be. Or other times, your family and cultural influences are very, very high. So we really leave the choice of what career you make to chance, really, instead of having a balanced career assessment or a career choice. And this, I think, has the opportunity to be templatized and offered to the right kind of institutions that service young people, whether it's schools, NGOs, youth resource centers. The final time frame of really 18 to 21, I think the opportunity is to almost soft launch young people into a career, right? Allow them to receive ample opportunities to understand what is it to be a working professional, even before they enter the career space. Most of our assessments of unemployability happen actually right at the time when people are trying to find jobs or right after they enter jobs where employers realize this isn't working. So when we see that so quickly, why not the simple solution is a longer trajectory of preparation, right? A longer trajectory of preparation from about 18 to 21 so that they get that time to understand what it is itself to be a professional. So I think that there are opportunities in that entire phase from adolescence to adulthood that can help us combat this. Okay, thank you. So Nick, you have a very unique lens in terms of an educator and a scholar, as well as being very studied here in India. What are the challenges that you see and because of your role, maybe a little bit around the challenges of the curriculum, but also challenges overall to handle this talent paradox? Yeah, thanks, Gary. And I want to begin by saying that as someone who is not resident here in India, I want to offer these reflections in the spirit of comradeship, which is to say that in the U.S. we confront many of these kinds of issues. And although there are differences, demographic differences, economic differences, infrastructure differences that are major, we actually share some of these challenges together. Now I currently lead a major university. It's the routinely ranked as the top public university in the United States, if not around the world. And it has been known for its excellence in just about every field. But we too are confronting right now a combination of things that I think are quite relevant to the situation in India. First of all, no public institution gets the kind of support it continues to need from the state, and therefore we are engaged in all kinds of public-private partnerships. And we're learning how indeed to call upon business as well as private philanthropists to help us support what we do. At the same time, major economic transformations and of course the crisis of post-2008 have led to a lot of concern about employability. Now I know in India the higher education sector, which of course is building on many of the issues you talked about vis-a-vis schools, and which I think is something that needs to be much better connected to the kind of mentoring that you've just described, has now four E's that are fundamental to it. Equity and excellence, these are actually the same two terms we use at the University of California. We talk about excellence and access. Also expansion, this of course is a time of dramatic expansion in the higher education sector in India. We did that in the 60s and 70s. The University of California went from one to two to ten campuses just as an example of that. We're now dealing of course with the consequences of expansion and insufficiency of funds to support it, but that's another matter. But the fourth E here is employability, and for obvious reasons, and all the things that we're talking about on this panel this morning do indeed invite us to think about how we can create a new generation that has the kinds of skills necessary to take full advantage, and then indeed to build and expand the economy in the future, to be innovative, to be entrepreneurial, to be technologically savvy, but also to be people who can actually take the future and help shape it. Now in that last regard, the history of higher education in the United States has always tried to balance a number of different things that in different contexts have been moved aside. We try to balance research and teaching, we try to balance the liberal arts as well as training and specialized areas, and we try to in some sense do it all. But I guess in at least this case I can say we have been enormously successful in many respects the most successful institution that we built in the United States is the college and university system. So I would advise, again as an outsider, that as you think about different kinds of reforms in the higher educational sector, we might be able to work together in productive ways to think about how one can combine general education which prepares people to be citizens, but also prepares them to continue to be learners. We know that learning isn't going to stop when you graduate from college. We know that there needs to be available and indeed necessary to keep training themselves in the future, but you have to learn how to learn and often you have to learn in a classroom setting even down at the level of the schools before you can be prepared to take advantage of the kind of new digital technologies that are going to be I think more and more pervasive. At the end of the day I think we have to think through what a hybrid approach would look like at all of these levels in both the economy, but also the needs of civil society, the needs of our global political world in the future going forward. Thanks, Nick. I can just attest the reputation that UC Berkeley has is just renowned for me in the United States putting three children through college, but also so globally. So thank you, Nick. Minister Ihrani, thank you very much for being here. I know that you're new in your role from late May, but as you have come into this role, talk to us a little about the challenges that you have seen as it relates to talent and the development of people to be job ready. Thank you. I very honestly don't look at education in our country as a challenge. I look at it as an opportunity to enable our people and better our systems. I would take off from where Mr. Kotak left. He spoke about this need to respect our teachers and I think that is one of our critical challenges currently. And this challenge does not restrain itself to only school education, but also has implications in higher education. We did a very unique project on the 5th of September which is celebrated as Teacher's Day in our country, trying to engage with our youth with regards to what respectability or what path our teachers determine for us. It was just a preparation of seven days. It was an out-of-the-box idea. But the idea was to generate interest in today's youth so that they can be teachers tomorrow. And we reached out to over 90 and a half million students in just a three hour interaction with children across the country. And I think what Mr. Kotak is saying is extremely close to my own heart. And in terms of policy we are rolling that out through a new Teacher's Training Program that we are undertaking. We are investing in it. But we are also ensuring that there are systemic changes without how the policy will be implemented. We are extremely concerned about the quality of teachers in the scientific community, in the technical community. We are in the process of establishing new academies for science and technical educators. We are in the process of even providing digital solutions to our teachers so that they can train on the job. And we are trying to attach it to their career advancement plans so that they know that they will be rewarded for retraining on the job. I appreciate what Ms. Bhartya has done. We are providing an opportunity for working professionals to learn. I was a working professional who fell out of the education system because I wanted to retain a job. And one of the biggest challenges is that we do not have a credit transfer system within our country that enables the migration of labour within our country. I am happy to share with you that on the 11th of November which will be celebrated as Education Day in our country, we are in the presence of the Honourable President of India going to roll out for the first time a credit equivalence framework from class 9 onwards up to post-grad level and in January we will have a credit transfer system up to Ph.D. so that those who go into the workforce can get back into the education system as and when they desire. Our central universities have been advised to have a seamless credit transfer system across the country and we have even conjoining forces with our ITIs where our people get technically trained for jobs so that they also have credits enough to get back into formal education irrespective of when they fall out. I think that will be one of the game changers that I envisage for the future. We have in the past five months, albeit the time was less, but established the first sector skills council where sector-wise and region-wise we are determining the skills that are not doing in isolation only with regards to our quality and bureaucracy. We have engaged with industry to identify the skills need for industry. We are also developing in collaboration with industry the modules for training and not only training people on the job but also training people as educators for those skills. For the first time I think I have heard a very young bright lady tell me about the need to address children at an adolescent stage. These are the critical thinking and inquiry-based learning. Also a desire to have an entrepreneurial skill. One of my challenges when I came into office was that education was working in silos. Our school sector was not speaking to higher education and when we sit together on one table and converge on ideas and approaches, I think that's where we see top-down and bottom-up changes. So I would like to tell Ms. Gupta that we are in the process of setting up placement cells in every university so that in the age of 18 to 21 we will counsel our students irrespective of the stream of education because our IITs and IIMs see a huge influx of industry which wants to pick up some of our brightest students but there is very little interaction with regards to our universities. So we are setting up those cells all across our country in all our central universities which are available in every state wherein students will be told about the possibilities vis-à-vis their own aptitudes about what skills they need or what job skills they are actually competent for and because they will have an industry and academia interaction in those cells, we are trying to increase their employability prospects as well. I'm of the opinion that the reservation given vis-à-vis reform, one needs to also look at our regulators and how they function and we have already set up two of our committees which look at improving our regulators from a higher education and technical education perspective so though the time was short we managed to do quite a bit but I will say that it is true, like Ms. Bhartia said, possibility vis-à-vis digital India we are enormous and we are looking at exploring that but the insistence that quality of education we maintain is also something that we have taken note of and in the next academic year we are starting the Indian version of MOOCs which is a blended process but because we have a challenge of even cost of education, our IITs IAM, central universities NITs are coming on board funded by government of India to give courses in graduation and graduation free of cost to every Indian and if you want a certificate for the process of learning then you go to that institute at a very concessional rate, you sit for the exam get a certificate and also have a credit back into the mainstream educational system so we are trying to do everything that is right but since we will roll out a new education policy next year, I am looking forward to most of the participants on this panel to even give their views there Thank you and I do appreciate trying to convert the challenge into an opportunity that is a great mindset Nick the minister used words of digital and entrepreneurship as potential solutions from your lens many of the upper institutions teach entrepreneurship they have courses around innovation obviously digital technology is changing education as well what do you see the area of digital technology and innovation and entrepreneurship from your lens do these things play a role in tackling this opportunity that we have Nick we have been experimenting with online technologies now for a few years there was a moment of great enthusiasm the president of Stanford my colleague said a tsunami is coming and the tsunami was massive open online courses but the first experiences of actually using them turned out to be considerably more complicated than that rush of enthusiasm in the first instance might have suggested and so the experience has been up and down but it turns out the experience does actually map in a certain way a lot of disruptive technologies there is that initial rush of enthusiasm then there are some things that don't work out and then it comes back up and sort of plateaus at a place somewhere in between and I think we're just coming back up to that plateau our university is engaged in a partnership with Harvard and MIT called edX it's a not-for-profit enterprise and it's trying to develop real courses that can be successful across both general areas in education but also very specific skills one of the things that's happened to Udacity which was set up by Sebastian Thrum who was a professor of artificial intelligence in computer science at Stanford and was one of the people who had those initial negative experiences are what he calls nano-degrees which are to say very specialized kinds of courses that are being designed in partnership with industry in order to train people to learn new kinds of opportunities as they come along but in discreet ways not to replace the educational sector but to build on it and of course there are other kinds of experiments that are taking place where we know that online technologies are going to help both in the schools and at the college and university level to open up opportunities to people who don't get the don't have the access that they need the challenge for us has always been I think two-fold one making sure that the students who have their first experience with this have the support they need and sometimes that does require people to be there to work with you while you're working on the screen because there's something very immediate to that the second challenge is to make sure that we actually do use technology as it is currently available to make that experience as rich as possible, as interactive as possible and so the idea that you can simply have a lecturer and then a set of homework problems that you do on your own turns out to be a little more complicated yes please minister we are in a history of our own times where we can learn from the mistakes of the past and course correct for the future we have studied the edX challenges and keeping that in mind we have formulated a process of a blending learning process where the institute does manage to get some kind of an interface with the student if the student so wants to make it a part of their own educational process or way forward but I think one aspect that Uday said which is extremely important is how do we assess in a very timely fashion the learning outcomes and many a times our students are in a flux because they reach that higher education prospects and suddenly realize that they're just course corrected in school education they possibly could have done better or possibly chosen a different path for themselves and just two days ago we launched a program called Saaranch CBSE is our central board of school education through Saaranch we are tracking students outcomes school wise subject wise student wise from 2007 onwards till now and onwards where every school will manage to leverage its outcomes vis-a-vis state outcomes regional outcomes and national outcomes this is only for the student for the school to enable itself to course correct for their students but we are adding a component in the next three months where each parent through a security code can access their own child learning outcomes monthly so that they can get into a discussion with their counselors at the school level itself as to what is the way forward for them because the challenges that like they said there is a need for change of mindset and most of our people look at education as a platform to judge other individuals not as a platform for enabling individuals so that paper costs a lot because people presume I mean you can't somebody very famously said you can't judge a fish's ability by its ability to climb a tree but that is one of our big challenges so we are trying to course correct between school education and higher education through those systems exactly thank you Shabon I know that htmedia is looking at bridge school management to address some of the skills mismatch that we've been talking about talk to us a little about the unique solutions that bridge school is doing as I mentioned in the opening comments as well that the bridge school of management is trying to actually its vision is born out of the education employment mismatch that exists because most institutes of higher education are not industry focused and therefore you find that curricula is outdated it is more theoretical learning as opposed to practical learning and most people feel that 40 or 44% of the people who come out find that they are mismatch for jobs they don't get career enhancement they don't get income increments because they aren't getting the kind of upward mobility that the institution should have prepared them for so our vision is really born from that and the bridge school is actually much more of a hybrid model which mixes online with face to face because as the minister rightly said you can't have full online to prepare people even for digital learning so it is a hybrid model where there is intervention on face to face interaction with your professors if so required and it also actually throws up a whole new pool of talent in terms of teachers and you know teachers is something which is in sort of it is a resource which is in great shortage in India I just want to add to what Uday said that in terms of respecting teachers we have an issue that teachers are poorly paid it's not the profession of choice in India an average teacher and I may be slightly inaccurate but what I would say gets anywhere close to about say 40,000 rupees which is pretty much what a taxi driver could earn in a tier one city so it's not a preferred career of choice because the emoluments there are actually not at par with many other professions so we try and create a fresh pool of teachers at the bridge school by getting working professionals and trying to leverage their skills to come and teach as well again it's not that they are the only teachers but we supplement our teaching staff with working professionals then because of the flexible online model you don't have to have the orthodoxy of once in a year intake of students students can join in smaller cohorts as and when and that also helps them in their networking so that's another unique feature that we've tried to introduce apart from the fact that there's hybrid learning and you know we spend almost 13 billion dollars annually India spends 13 billion in sending students overseas to study so there's no reason why we believe we can't set up institutions of higher learning I think it really merits a thought yeah we talked a little bit about the report on the great unskilled can we fix it it does talk about the role of private sector can you give us some of your more thoughts around the role of private sector in terms of the solution to the talent paradox the situation today is we have a very large number of students who are schooled but not educated graduates but not learnt and we have a system which is essentially working towards getting a job in most of the private sector a person will not get a job unless he or she is a graduate therefore you have the entire system being gamed to get that certificate for getting a job the problem is it has this student had enough learning on the way to get that job and then on the way there is significant churn we run a foundation which is dealing with school education for the underprivileged the dropout ratio is 50% therefore you think about huge churn on the way and people who survive that churn are really gaming the system for getting a job how do you move away from this mindset to what minister Irani said that education has to be an enabler for how the student thinks about the future opportunity in terms of his or her life instead of that if you move to a system which is making education a formula rather than making sure that skills are developed we run some schools in rural Maharashtra just a few kilometers outside Mumbai where parents don't send the students to school because the school education has no ability to give knowledge even in the later standards on anything connected with agriculture and the child after the 10th or the 12th moment he or she is 15 or 16 is supposed to go and work in farms so there is little relevance between what the school education is doing to where the child wants to have the future similar situation in undergraduate colleges I think Shobana is absolutely right so many of our students are going overseas what is it that we are doing to bring that link between quality or reasonable education at school thereafter options for students to go into a vocational area or an undergrad education in India which we can be proud of I am ashamed to say that both my children studied undergraduation overseas because we felt it was better for them when do we get a chance and hopefully by the time my kids have kids they will have their kids do their undergrad also in India and that's the hope I don't get it my kids wanted to go to education overseas too I am going to ask the panelists one more question and then we are going to go to the audience so please think about your question as I am told that we can go a few minutes over I am going to ask you a follow up question that Uday had and I read a blog of yours and you I'll paraphrase it but it basically was your concern over everybody's desire or a majority of people's desire to go into IT and so talk to us a little bit about that concern and what it is that you would like to see sure so I think what we struggled with was not that we want to because the whole process of mentorship should not prescribe judgment on any of these not that we want to say non IT also but that we were worried about that young people felt that their only gauge of success was if they got into that that their minds had been so closed off to the idea of exploring and failing and doing other things and working with a lot of corporates they end up because we are in Bangalore, Pune, Chennai a lot of them are the IT companies but what we have been able to do is just open up their workforces and mind their best talent to offer mentorship to young people who don't have access to it in a way that a lot of our mentors say it's not that you should be like me it's saying that the world is changing and you can plan for a career that has a lot of different ups and downs to enter and exit different industries and you should be open to that I think that is my concern and I think what I see as the future for it would be that at a very local at a very hyper local level within the first 5 kilometers of every young person's house there will be there will be employers there will not be IT companies there will be MSMEs there are lots of ideas about employability as well which we don't allow young people to experience at all we have a very limited notion of what is respectable employment and that's what prevents people from fully engaging with the concept from a young age I would love to change that I understand I just have one follow up question to you in a couple of your remarks you did talk about new proposals but before we go to the audience is there anything else you'd like to talk about around the national policy and skill development of 09 and some of the things that you didn't get a chance to say that these new proposals I will just say this that one of the biggest challenges I foresee is in the field of research the learning outcomes will be science and maths in our country from grade 6 to 8 have fallen up to 30 percent and just to give a new trust to that because we are a country of creative thinkers though our education system currently challenges us not to think out of the box and apart from creative thinking an enquiry based learning methodology needs to be re-inculcated back into our system and just to give that trust we are starting the rastri avishkar abhyan also next year which is the national science initiative wherein for primary education and secondary education we want to engage communities back into the school system as to how they can support students for science and innovation and parents can have more inputs into that learning methodology apart from that we will also give trust to research in higher education there is a lack of understanding of how to patent your innovation or how to get equity to support it as a business model we are looking at prospects through industry collaboration of the best innovations in our country and at the end of the day providing it enough money here in India so that ideals don't fly out of the country but get rooted very much in our systems and we present to our students an opportunity that if you think out of the box if you innovate, if you go down the path of research you will find money from industry, from government to back it as a business model and I think that is also very essential apart from the other opportunities that we are looking at for our students okay, looks like there is lots of hands we have some mics I believe so can we start up here with this gentleman right up here good morning, my name is Frank Jack Daniel I am a correspondent with Reuters news organization here in Delhi there has been a very interesting discussion about employability I have heard less about the employment side of the equation what comes first as you alluded to at the start of your conversation there is an interesting debate around whether manufacturing can be repeated as the model that provides jobs for millions of Indians over the next decade I am wondering if some people on the panel could touch on that and whether or not manufacturing can repeat the successes it had in say, Southeast Asia or China if those successes can be repeated in India or if the model needs to be tweaked to fit this 21st century reality I mean in a country where we need 12 to 14 million jobs a year we go to throw everything at everything and if you look at some of the other countries particularly in Asia and China is the most outstanding example manufacturing has been a significant part of the growth engine for jobs India over the last 10 or 15 years and I go back to the period immediately after 2000 probably went into a mindset which moved away from manufacturing to a society where people were trying to get rich quick through arbitrage rather than building solid manufacturing businesses if you go back to the 90s and I think there are some of the businessmen here getting manufacturing right making it efficient was the key look at Rahul Bajaj, Anand Mahendra in the 90s they really got their manufacturing efficient post 2003 for as global funny money moved around to see how I can do a quick infrastructure project, manage something free and make some quick money so for 10 years India really lost its focus on manufacturing as an important core of our future I think it's come back because we and I think Prime Minister Modi's statement of making India is a clarion call to Indian business and industry that manufacturing is important but I am in services and I believe we can create a lot of jobs therefore in a way I would love to see India and Indian business compete to show who can create more jobs manufacturing your services and I won't write off services because in services India has a competitive advantage over many other countries and therefore yes make in India certainly yes ok, right here in the middle there please and then I'll go to the further in the back of the room on the next question my name is Pei Emilsson from Sweden I have something called Kunskapskolan that is a chain of 50 schools K1 to K12 in Sweden, United Kingdom, United States and now in India we have tried to I think manage combined digital with teachers developing a fairly unique model for personalized education that has been very much appreciated it's very interesting to listen to Minister Irani we see enormous opportunities in India and our plans now stand to go from about 1,000 students to 10,000 students in the next coming five years I had the option to ask the question to one of your predecessors five years ago and he was not very keen of us being here so my question to you Minister Irani do you want us as a foreign company to come and work here in India well Uda is bringing a huge trust and rearticulating what the Prime Minister said about make in India and he's added the serve in India thing which I'm extremely proud of insofar as inviting new avenues of knowledge into our country we've actually been doing that for thousands of years so it's not something that will be unique to me or my leadership but yes we all do it within a framework of regulations we are trying to ensure that those regulations in itself are not detrimental for progress vis-a-vis education as long as you follow our rules you're more than happy to stay let's go right there in the back about the fifth row back there gentlemen with his right arm up and... Sandeep Sibal from Qualcomm I am a beneficiary of education in the US so very good and glad to see Chancellor UC Berkeley here. Actually my question was to you lately there's been a concern that the spiraling cost of college education in the US has led to some fairly onerous situation with college with student debt as India looks to grow its university system especially in a country where clearly finances are constrained what advice would you have for us here? Thank you and as you know one of our graduates at Berkeley is the CEO of the board of Qualcomm so we have a lot of kinship no it's a serious question about the cost of higher education which has really been in some sense the major that has been confronting higher education across all sectors in the US the cost of education has gone along with a spiraling student debt amount which just crossed a trillion dollars a couple of years ago and then generated a great deal of concern not just about the cost but also about the implications of that debt on the economy going forward in terms of not just getting jobs but buying houses taking mortgages being able to actually invest in the economy after you made that initial investment in higher education but the truth of the matter is that in the public university system we are actually very efficient the in-state tuition in the University of California is still less than 13,000 which contrasts with where at least one of your sons went to college I know because I used to teach there which has a tuition rate now of over $50,000 a year and the reason even for the $12,000, $13,000 price tag is because so much of the state support that used to be directed to the college's universities and the public sector has gone down so the advice is certainly that I think we have to envision the kind of education one can get in a college whether it's more technical whether it's more business whether it's more liberal arts or whatever as a public good and therefore something that requires public support that is not however to say because one is realistic that all that public support needs to come from the state I think there forms a partnership that can be used as the higher education system here expands as it changes as it's reformed I think there are issues that have to be taken into account that are not going to actually be effective in the first instance forgive me for saying this but I think that salary is not just for teachers but also for professors has to become more competitive in order to keep the world's best talent here not to mention bring talent inside and I believe that that is going to end up requiring some difficult choices about how one is going to support that I also believe that the premier institutions have to engage in research as well as teaching I think that union of research and teaching has been extremely productive in the US and I think in fact it would help deal with some of the questions that have to do with how you support R&D in this country as well but these are not inexpensive items because they are quote-unquote labor intensive and it does require bringing some of the best talent in at a competitive level so as one adjust to a new model the worst thing that could perhaps happen here is that the cost spiral could take place in India and then be detrimental to issues of access issues of equity and ultimately issues of the economy going beyond the accumulation not just of skills but of the kinds of educational values that I think are going to be so important for the foundations of civil society across this great nation but thank you for your question one more in the back there and just state your name and ask the question clearly to a particular panelist Hi my name is Bneeth and I'm from the Mumbai community of the global Shapers community at the web I think there are some very good initiatives been taken for skill training and shaping the students but the way I look at it the way parents in society dictate career decisions is pretty large in India and you know and which is why children are told to study for certificates as opposed to honing their skills or skill sets and therefore are there any steps being taken to help parents understand the full potential of their children and not fall prey to sort of misplaced perceptions and they play a big role in sort of determining skill which is why for example manufacturing is not being looked at at a higher order than so it means the service sector takes priority over manufacturing sometimes you know parents don't want children to get into the manufacturing sector so any of the panelists but specifically Minister Irani if you can take that Thanks I think that you have hit right on the top of the nail and I totally agree with what you say and I think that credit transference system that we are trying to provide will be one such initiative and tool to make parents understand that when the child or student oscillates between the workforce and the educational system the so called comfort of a degree or a paper or a certificate will reside with that student but for greater encouragement and engagement with the parent there are two three things that we are envisaging and we are unfolding one is the Rajyaavishkar Abhiyan which I spoke about while we are trying to give a trust to science and innovation and entrepreneurial skills we are engaging directly with the parent at the school level so that this entire challenge that a student faces vis-a-vis the choices they want to make can be tempered a little by involving the parent more we are rolling out from the next academic session a project called Shalhadarpan for our schools wherein a parent on a mobile in the language of their choice will get every aspect of the student's activity in school not as a deterrent but as an enabler and engaging more with the parent the minute your child steps into schools and puts up their attendance whether the homework for the day has been submitted or not what are the lectures or the lessons that were learned today what is the outcome for that what is the examination that the child has to sit for what is the outcome of that and where the parent needs to help the child that will be done through mobile devices which I feel that will help engage the parent more with the school and the child on a daily basis I also feel that through technology we are trying to bring specially working professionals closer to the concept of schooling that we envisage which needs to change like Ms. Gupta said let's presume that apart from IT based professions what are the other professions that we want our children to take up I had a meeting with regards to school education where I said can we look at a possibility of making our children appreciate let's say a state craft cultural aspects and they said well if you want to be an artisan you should learn that I said no for you to buy that art purchase that art one needs to have that ingrained sense of appreciation of art unfortunately most of us would take it seriously in school if it becomes a part of your timetable so I said well then make it a part of your timetable so these are small small steps that we are taking which will affect the way that we think about education the way that we want to develop critical thinking or appreciation for that fact that we are such a diverse country so we are trying to do our best and if you have any ideas so that we can do better please feel free to share them with me a fellow global shaper here wants to respond I totally tell you so a lot of the mentors who are in our programs are rising professionals who are parents themselves and often times when we interview them for why they want to be a mentor they said because we want to do better jobs as parents we are the ward who we can help counsel maybe we will understand our own children better so I think parents universally struggle with how to do a better job and I think that in addition it's absolutely fantastic that you are giving parents a step by step view of how children are performing don't miss out the aspect of mental and other well-being because it's so critical to your ability to be prepared for life and I think parents miss out on those softer aspects of okay I may be good in math and science but maybe my interest doesn't lie in there and so how do I reconcile to what my interest and aptitude aligns with which are much more than what scores can capture and I think that softer aspect is what parents often struggle with because they want to see good economic prospects for their children so that's why they often push them into these so I feel if parents were engaged in that larger discussion of what's the I hope it doesn't sound too trivial but what's the meaning of life and how can they help their young people all right very good I'm going to go to one more question I also want to just alert the panelists that the way we're going to close I'm going to ask each of you for a one sentence or a tagline thought to the audience I never really did this in our pre-deafing session but I do want to let you know that that's what's going to happen just so that you don't get cold feet and don't know what to say okay let's take one more question okay right over here please I'm Prakash Hinduja from Hinduja Group of Companies I was very happy to see about the education my father used to say health and education is the key point of the human life which I'm so happy that the now the panels many panels are going on for the health and education for in Africa I was in Singapore at the Forbes event there also the health and education issue was being planned but I would request you one thing Americans have been into India for 20 years and they pick up the best of the IQ and the brains from India and they have exported from India all the brains and they have proved to be very successful why the Indian government is not creating a think tank to pick up the brains of the intelligence of the universities in India where that intelligence are being properly rewarded and properly transmitted to the other intelligence plan so it's really I feel that our commitment for the industrialists who are committed to India and they should focus and they try to pick up the best of the brains but they do not pay them as they have been paid in states or abroad or in Britain if we encourage an increment of the best brains in India they will not go to United States and the same education can be given to them in India itself and the technology from United States can be transferred to India and this is happening now and I see many of the retired professors, retired talented deans are coming to India and to see how they can create education as a business so I will request the panel to take this conclusion of the panel take place and the minister Irani could think and tell to the government that there is a lot of intelligence in this country but it's so pity that we are not able to focus and in cash from these intelligent brains, thank you I will decide too Mr. Hindujan, I don't know whether you will be too pleased with the initiatives that we have undertaken we have researched and supporting our faculty we have identified with the help of our scientific community our faculty members in our IITs and all the premier technical institutions in the country, 10 research goalposts that India needs to reach in the next 10 years and on those goalposts our scientific community, our faculty together has constituted different teams which will not only tell us what are the curriculum changes we need in higher education and school education but also tell us in terms of research how we need to support them through new technology in our labs that we have done under the IIT I am the chairperson of the IIT council and we have just rolled out a plan called new faculty, new hope we started it as a pilot project in IIT Kanpur wherein our young faculty which have new research projects to go out of the country to get those researches supported we financially now support that research so that we can retain that faculty we also are making sure that we have an interaction with some of the best academicians across the world this is a project which is extremely close to the prime minister's heart called global initiative for academic networks which we call Gyan wherein some of the illustrious academicians and industry experts from across the world will be paid to come and teach in Indian institutions and our institutions will not be charged so that our students can learn the latest technologies and techniques in education and our faculty can be trained by those international experts Ms Gupta spoke about a need for appreciation of more opportunities and life skills one of the challenges demographically I see is in the northeast of India and we started a project called Ishan Vikas from grade 9 onwards to our engineering students and higher education students we are selecting over 2,000 children and taking them at our cost all across the country for other opportunities that they can see apart from hospitality or for that matter the hotel management so called industry that they basically fall in line with and we are also taking faculty along with them and we are engaging parents so that we tell them that the northeast need not restrain themselves to only that one hospitality business so we are doing these initiatives and we are hoping that we will course correct thank you minister I want to thank the audience for your active participation we are going to have to wind it down but as I mentioned I am going to ask each one of the panelists with their closing thoughts and I guess today since you are right next to me I am going to have to start with you if India has to happen education has to transform there is so much to do but the future is bright that is my closing comments Nick I think the future is bright too I am actually made even more confident and optimistic by this panel and the discussion here because of the recognition of the power of education not just to train the future generations not just for skill based employment but actually to train them for life to train them for citizenship in this country in this world and to help us figure out the new jobs of the future it is going to be our graduates who are going to have to deal with everything from climate change to not just manufacture but advance manufacture to things that involve robotics transformation of the labor force and in all of that there are social, political and their cultural as well as economic and about infrastructure so to hear this level of accord on this stage about the importance of education makes me feel very confident as well Thank you I think reskilling or resetting the skill sector remains a huge challenge and I think that to attain the skill that we require in that apart from what we always just discussed in terms of technology I would take advantage of our minister being present here and say that this would lead to social infrastructure and therefore it merits a thought for the minister to consider giving the education sector infrastructure status that will help it in terms of funds and tax breaks because you need huge investments in this sector Our unity is an important constituent of the gathering here is business I will say that there's incredible shared value for business to engage with employability and I would and not to look at it just a short term ROI when you're really trying to hire but really invest in young people from the time that they're looking out for that guidance and support Thank you I think change never came from comfort zones it always came from challenges I'm glad that we are challenged as a nation and as Uday said we make sure that education becomes that positive enabler and that process of transformation that we as a nation are undertaking currently I want to thank the panelists for their time and their talent and taking time to help today and also the active participation from the audience I want to thank you so let's all give ourselves a hand thank you very much