A Digital Ecosystem for Skills and Livelihoods (DESH-Stack) will be launched to empower citizens to acquire skills, retrain or upskill through online training, the Minister for Finance Nirmala Sitharaman. Presenting the 2022-23 budget to Parliament, Sitharaman also announced that a digital university will be established to provide access to world-class quality universal education to students across the country with a personalized learning experience at their doorstep.
This will be available in different Indian languages and ICT (information and communication technology) formats. The university will be built on a star network model, with the cluster developing cutting-edge ICT expertise. The country’s top universities and public institutions will collaborate as a hub-and-spoke network, she shared. The finance minister said programs and partnerships with industry will be refocused to promote lifelong learning pathways, sustainability and employability.
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The National Skills Qualifications Framework (NSQF) will be aligned with the dynamic needs of the industry, she added. Sitharaman announced that 750 virtual science and math labs, as well as 75 skills e-labs for a simulated learning environment, will be set up in 2022-23 to promote critical thinking skills and provide space. to creativity.
Referring to the digital ecosystem for skills and livelihoods, she said the portal aims to empower citizens to acquire skills, retrain or upgrade through online training. It will also provide trusted Application Program Interface (API) based skills credentials, payment and discovery layers to find relevant jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities. The finance minister said start-ups will be promoted to facilitate “Drone Shakti” across varied applications and for drone as a service (DrAAS). In some Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs), in all states, the courses required for skill acquisition will be initiated.
Sitharaman said that due to pandemic-induced school closures, children, especially in rural areas, and those from Scheduled Castes and Tribes, and other weaker sections, have lost nearly two years of education. formal education. “Most of the time, these are children in public schools. We recognize the need to provide additional education and build a resilient mechanism for education delivery.
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“To this end, PM eVIDYA’s ‘First Class TV Channel’ program will expand from 12 to 200 TV channels. This will allow all states to provide additional instruction in regional languages for grades 1 through 12,” she said. Additionally, high-quality e-content in all spoken languages will be developed for delivery via the internet, mobile phones, TV and radio via digital educators, the finance minister said.
A competitive mechanism for the development of quality e-content by teachers will be put in place to empower and equip them with digital teaching tools and facilitate better learning outcomes, she added.
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