EdExcitement

The madness of the last 2 years is settling down a little - jumping from vocational training to higher education; enough to allow me to reflect on the amazing experience of vocational skills training at the grassroots levels in India. Industrial Training Institutes On one hand, we have the ITIs (Industrial Training Institutions, for the uninitiated); reasonably good hard infrastructure (buildings, machines, facilities) and extremely poor soft infrastructure (people, quality of training and even basic discipline). It has been a great experience for me to be acting as Chairman for 7 ITIs in Haryana for the past 30 months. Taking a closer look, the students coming into these institutions from the villages in the state have great potential and most of them, contrary to popular belief, come in with a lot of expectation. However, they soon become part of the web of “free” education with no accountability on the quality of training. New buildings are made, but housekeeping staff (‘sweeper’ in...