Odisha needed to create an aspirational, branded idea that the best skilled people came from Odisha so that the skilled youth from the state commanded a premium in wage markets across the country, said Odisha Skill Development Authority chairman Subroto Bagchi.
Delivering a keynote address on “Investing in Human Resource is the Key to Growth” at the State of the State Conclave in Bhubaneswar, Bagchi said that Odisha needs to make 6.3 lakh youth skilled through long term and short term courses by 2018-19.
Well equipped ITIs have the potential to create skilled talents on a mass scale, especially youth from rural background.
“A total of 80% of those trained will go outside the state. We have to shift the conversation from ‘skilled’ to ‘Skilled in Odisha’. In a three-year period, we want the corporate India to make a beeline to Odisha not just to hire, but to ‘lock-in’ our talent,” Bagchi said.
To achieve that, he said, the infrastructure in ITIs will have to be enhanced radically. The state has to make the 44 government-run ITIs as exemplars for others to follow and accelerate the Advanced Skill Training Institutes to raise the bar in technical education. He informed that 100 ITI teachers would be trained in ITE in Singapore.
“The ITIs have to be fixed at physical, digital, intellectual and emotional levels,” he said.
