Open university plans 'skill stations' for traditional village artisans

NASHIK: The Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University (YCMOU) plans to set up skill-stations at the district-level across the state, with the help of the state government to start training programmes for traditional village artisans.
Arun Jamkar, YCMOU's acting vice-chancellor announced this during his address at the university's 2oth convocation programme on Saturday.
Jamkar said, "Today the focus is that higher education should be profession-oriented.This is mandatory, considering the gap in expected growth of the country and actual skilled manpower. However, there are many village artisans, who have achieved business skills traditionally and cannot get employment due to lack of educational qualifications from government-recognized educational institutes or universities. Considering this, we decided to set up district-level skill stations across the state, with help from the state government. Small certificate courses for traditional village artisans will also be provided."
He also said, "The earlier generation of students was known as the 'hard copy' generation as they would get their knowledge through books. But now, this generation is becoming rare as students are attracted to the digital or virtual world. They are making maximum use of the internet. Such changes have transformed the role of teachers and thereby the responsibilities of colleges and universities have increased. Instead of mass production therefore, we need to move towards mass customization."
About the country's manpower shortage, Jamkar said, "The drugs are manufactured at large in the country, but the pharmaceutical companies in the country are facing shortage of skilled manpower. With an aim to overcome this shortage, we have signed MoUs with multi-national companies in the pharmaceutical sector to developed postgraduate syllabus in optometry, medical lab technology and industrial drug science subjects under the scheme 'learn and earn'."
Around 1.09 lakh students were conferred with degrees and diplomas, including 75,885 undergraduate students, 6,407 postgraduate students and 27,460 diploma course students. Gold medals were presented to 45 students for their outstanding performance in the exams.