Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Wednesday called for higher education institutions to target exponential growth towards building a future-ready workforce and leveraging technology to further decolonise education.
"The age of incremental change is gone and I call upon higher educational institutes to target exponential growth towards building a future-ready workforce," he said at a two-day Visitor conference which concluded on Wednesday.
Speaking about the challenges and opportunities in the new world propelled by technology, he said, "India has shown its technological prowess in various initiatives like UPI, Direct Benefit Transfer, Aadhaar and we must build upon this strength and make a future-ready workforce to embrace the changes arising out of Industrial Revolution 4.0."
Pradhan pointed out the rising number of Indian start-ups in the unicorn club as an indicator of a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem and called for preparing the students to be job givers and not just job seekers.
The conference deliberated on various topics such as international rankings of higher education institutions, collaboration between academia-industry and policymakers, integrating school, higher and
vocational education, and education and research in emerging and disruptive technologies.
President Ram Nath Kovind is the Visitor of 161 central institutes of higher education. Out of 161 institutes, representatives of 53 attended the conference physically while the rest joined it virtually.