About 8.5 lakh engineering seats are vacant in the country because industry does not want more engineers but more skilled entry-level people, said Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Minister of State (independent charge) for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship at National Leadership Summit

About 8.5 lakh engineering seats are vacant in the country because industry does not want more engineers but more skilled entry-level people, said Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Minister of State (independent charge) for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship at National Leadership Summit organized by All India Management Association. The infrastructure of many closed engineering colleges was being used to run ITI and diploma programmes, the Minister said.“Make in India will not happen unless we have makers in India,” said Rudy. He said that now there were 80 skill schemes in 24 ministries and a large number of skills councils had been formed with the industry. The Minister said that his aspiration was to see a day when matrimonial ads would say that the desired son-in-law should be a master chef or a master plumber. He attributed the lack of aspirations for skills in India to the general ignorance about the levels of sophistication in skills. “My job is to help those who are earning Rs 2000-3000 a month to earn Rs 10,000-12,000 a month,” he said.Rudy also said that the government will pass the National Skills Qualifications Framework Act to enable movement of people across vocational and general education.



Firdose Vandrevala, President, AIMA shared that AIMA had formed the Management and Entrepreneurship and Professional Skills Council to develop occupational standards, training content and methodology and certification mechanism for business skills required by every sector of the economy. The Skill Council planned to train and certify approximately 4.75 lakhs trainees, develop 50 Qualifications Packs or National Occupational Standards, and train more than 550 Trainers over next 10 years, he informed.



Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament, addressed the Conclave earlier and said that India was ready to make rules for the world. “India has the strength and the resources to set the global agenda from the cyber space to the outer space,” he said. He added that in the post superpower age, India needed to practice multi-alignment as the networked world was a fluid place and there was no room for domination by any one nation.



Commenting on India’s troubled relationships with its immediate neighbours, Tharoor said that India’s size intimidated the small neighbours and India had to give them more than what they could give India. Talking about India’s geopolitical role in relation to China, Tharoor said that India and China could cooperate in securing the region instead of competing as was being suggested by the western strategists. He also advised allowing the neighbouring states, including Pakistan, to develop economic stakes in India to ensure that they had influential constituencies that would not allow anti-India activities.