Skill Vibes: Pause..Reflect..

  S kill Universities, as a concept included in the National Skills Policy 2015 has become fashionable in the Indian Skills ecosystem. A number of such Universities have already come up and many more are in the process of setting up. At the top level, the development of Human Resource is divided between MSDE and MHRD, which must converge to  become one big HRD Ministry with two major verticals of Education and Skills under one Cabinet Minister. The recent portfolio allocation of appointing one Cabinet Minister for both the Ministries was a positive move, hopefully next step should be to merge the two.  At the next level, the UGC will have to make special provisions for these Skills Universities to optimise their functioning. An example to support the points is the guidelines for hiring of trainers, which must be at least in as much detail as for hiring of the Assistant Professors and above. These Universities may aim to enhance the social aspiration of the potential stude...

S mart Cities is a wonderful mission. To make it sustainable, it has been argued to extend the project to make cities liveable, which makes sense. One look at the websites of the 100 selected Smart Cities shows a lot of work is in progress, some bit executed, appears more for visibility with low impact, easy to execute projects, however, more serious work is in planning / tendering phase. The question that arises is who will plan and execute these smart / liveable city projects? Will the dependence continue on the expertise of existing people who have been responsible for messing up the city planning!! There are 79 indicators (57 core and 22 supporting) listed by the Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India as “Liveability Standards in Cities” to generate the liveability index and rate cities. The list is very comprehensive. Each of these indicators, whether it is water management or pollution control or transport / traffic management, toilets, or energy, or crime control...