Government announced a slew of digital skilling and digital university-focussed initiatives at the Union Budget 2022. Skilling programmes and industry partnerships will be reoriented to promote skilling avenues and employability.
The National Skill Qualification Framework (NSQF) will now be updated based on the changing industry needs.
The government will be launching Digital Ecosystem for Skilling and Livelihood – the DESH-Stack e-portal to skill, reskill and upskill citizens through online training. There will be API-based trusted skill credentials, payment and added discovery layers to find relevant jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities.
“(We are) Encouraged to see the government focused on digital skilling to encourage continual skilling avenues, sustainability, and employability through online training, programmes, and industry collaborations, as well as the establishment of skilling e-labs for simulated learning settings. These are positive moves toward making India a global talent powerhouse,” IT industry body NASSCOM said.
Boost in e-learning
Students from marginalised communities, weaker sections and rural areas who are mostly studying in government schools were the most impacted during the last two years of pandemic due to lack of adequate e-learning resources.
The government is now expanding ‘one class-one TV channel’ programme of PM eVIDYA from 12 to 200 TV channels. This will enable all states to provide supplementary education in regional languages for classes 1-12.
For various vocational courses, 750 virtual labs in science and mathematics, and 75 skilling e-labs for simulated learning environment will be set-up in 2022-23.
High quality e-content will be developed for delivering lessons. Teachers too will be helped with developing e-content
.Separately, the FM announced, “A Digital University will be established to provide access to students across the country for world-class quality universal education with personalised learning experience at their doorsteps. This will be made available in different Indian languages and ICT formats. The University will be built on a networked hub-spoke model, with the hub building cutting edge ICT expertise. The best public universities and institutions in the country will collaborate as a network of hub-spokes.”
Sumeet Mehta, Co-founder and CEO of the unicorn edtech LEAD, welcomes the move but adds a caveat that this budget somewhere missed the offline education system.
“As an educator, I welcome the emphasis on creating digital and free-to-air channels of education. However, at the same time, the budget appears to circumvent physical schooling. I sincerely hope that is not the case. While online learning was inevitable due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it would never be as effective as offline learning, which brings out the best in students in terms of learning outcome and performance,” he said.
Mehta added, “Online education can at best only play a supplementary role in education. I would have also loved to see a greater focus on improving the teaching and learning processes in our schools vis-a-vis infrastructure and tech-enabled curriculum. Going forward, I hope there will be policy changes in that direction.”