Team Herald
PANJIM: Padma Bhushan Ajai Chowdhry, the co-founder of HCL Infosystem Ltd on Tuesday urged State government to market and brand its educational institutions for employability enhancement.
“We need to put in place a system to market Goa’s educational institutions at the national and international level. The State government should take marketing and branding ideas from BJP, who are best in it,” he said while delivering a key note address at the inauguration of Centre of Excellence for Employability Enhancement (CEE) by DTE.
Chowdhry, the chairman of IIT Patna, said that Goa should be a feeding ground for industries looking for skilled work force.
“I always believe that BJP has the biggest marketing skill. Who else can be better than BJP to take classes on marketing,” he said.
“The way India is marketed and branded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the world, today everybody is worried about India. Earlier, who was worried about India,” the industry expert added
“That is happening because lot of marketing efforts has been put in by the Central government under BJP to market India,” Chowdhry said.
Earlier in his speech, he said that employment is one of the biggest challenges before the country today. “With lack of job opportunity, students are losing out interest in engineering, MBA and other professional courses,” he said adding it is because ‘the education that our schools provide is not fit enough for the IT or other industry’.
Chowdhry lamented the fact that parents and students today are more focused on getting degrees rather than working on acquiring skills and emphasised that this mindset needs to be changed. “The focus should be on skill and not degree,” he said.
He also said that efforts need to be made to bridge the gap between the type of skill needed by the industries and the type of skill that ‘our education provides’.
With employment opportunities being major concern, Chowdhry said that colleges need to start teaching entrepreneurship, to create more and more entrepreneurs.
