India – More vocational capacity needs to be created

As things stand now, the numbers simply don’t add up. In the national capital region alone, 85% of students cleared the boards this year. In absolute numbers, this is 2,00,393 candidates. DU has 54,000 seats. Other than an increase in seats following implementation of the OBC quota in 2009, college seats have remained constant….

“We’ve not focused on vocational education. I hope the National Vocational Educational Qualification Framework is implemented in right earnest. More colleges need to be created. No government has tried to allocate 6% of GDP to education so far,” former NCERT director J S Rajput says. Aimed at giving 5million students vocational degrees and diploma annually, HRD ministry launched the National Vocational Educational Qualification Framework this March. These vocational programmes will be offered from academic session 2012-13 across educational institutions under the All India Council for Technical Education.

These vocational programmes will start from Class IX identified as level one and go up to level VII. On completion of these levels, students will get degrees. The courses will deal with IT, media, entertainment, telecom, mobile communications, automobile, construction, retail, food processing, tourism, jewellery design and fashion design and others.

“It is high time we made vocational education desirable. Why should all students feel the need to come to Delhi or to other big cities? In order improve the acceptance of these vocational education course established institutions like DU and the IITs should offer them,” said principal of Gargi College, Meera Ramachandran….

via Go vocational, build capacity – Times Of India.