Graded autonomy for top private engineering and B-schools

EQUALITY The move will provide certain amount of parity in status and a level playing field to the PGDM institutions

NEWDELHI: After granting autonomy to IIMS and top universities, the education regulators have now granted gradedautonomy to leading private engineering and B-schools in the country that among other things shall be eligible for government grants and annual monitoring from regulators.

The All Indian Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has notified it decisions to categorise institutions into three categories based on their performance, excellence in domestic and international rankings and national accreditations.

Category-1 engineering and B-schools shall be eligible for “grants and no inspections by the AICTE,” the new policy notification said.

“They can start new courses without approval; they may start skill courses; they open research parks, incubation centres or institute society linkage centres, provided it’s in “self-financing mode, either on its own or in partnership with private partners”.

Such engineering and management schools will be allowed to recruit foreign faculty and admit foreign students and decide on their salaries and fee independently. These institutions shall be “exempted from annual monitoring of their institutions…except when there is substantive evidence of their not meeting basic minimum criteria or of irregularities or malpractices”.

To get a category-1 status, for example, an institution must be running three courses and all of them must have got accreditation from the National Board of Accreditation with a score not less than 75% or 750 out of 1000 accreditation score. NBA accredits individual subjects in schools. If a school runs seven courses, at least five of them must have a score of 75% or above. Institutions who have a 67.5% score (upt0 75%), will be clubbed in the category-ii institutions and rest will be category three. The first two category will also enjoy academic autonomy.

Other than the NBA score, if an engineering or B-school gets into the top 100 global subject rankings including the FT Global MBA Ranking or QS Global MBA Ranking will be considered for the grade one autonomy. “After IIMS autonomy, most of the private B-schools were in disadvantage. This notification brings certain amount of parity in status and provide a level playing field to the PGDM institutions with IIMS to some extent,” said H. Charurvedi, director of Birla Institute of Management Technology (Bimtech) in Greater Noida, a leading private B-school. Other than Bimtech, hundreds of B-schools including XLRI Jamshedpur, MDI Gurgaon, IMT Ghaziabad, Great Lakes Institutes in Chennai, Mudra Institute of Communication Ahmedabad (MICA), Goa Institute of Management, Fore School in New Delhi and Rp-sanjiv Goenka Group’s International Management Institute (IMI) in New Delhi are likely to benefit from the new notification from the coming academic year.

“It will also free the accredited institutions from red tapism, bureaucratic delays and archaic rules and help them to align their curriculum and programme bouquets with the ever-changing requirements of the Industry at national and global level,” said Chaturvedi, who is also the alternate president of the education promotion society of India, a confederation of private education providers.

IMPACT OF AI IN JOBS

Several studies agree that AI and automation are likely to render several job titles obsolete in the coming years. For example, why would you need a waiter in a restaurant when a robot can do the job flawlessly? Bangalore recently saw the launch of the Robot Restaurant, where food is served by a team of humanoid robots. Similarly, roles such as cashiers or drivers or bank tellers are unlikely to last.

As per a study by Teamlease Services, we can expect about 52-69 percent of repetitive and predictive roles across sectors such as IT, financial services, manufacturing, transportation, packaging, and shipping to be automated in the near future. A 2017 Mckinsey Global Institute study predicts that automation will claim jobs of about 800 million people around the world by 2030. While these numbers are telling, they do not represent the whole truth. If we take a more nuanced approach, we find that while there will be job losses, there will also be new kinds of jobs created. As per the World Economic Forum, machines and algorithms are expected to displace about 75 million jobs by 2022. At the same time, these technologies are also likely to

THE PROFILE OF JOBS WILL CHANGE

While machines can excel at repetitive, manual, or memorybased tasks, they find it harder to replicate human capabilities like creativity, teamwork, innovative thinking; making these skills even more valuable.

This means that we can expect to see a shakeup in the job market. As per a Mckinsey Global Institute report titled ‘Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation,’ about 375 million workers (or 14 percent of the global workforce) may need to switch their occupational categories by 2030 by training themselves for a new career path.

A similar sentiment is echoed by the EY- Nasscom ‘Future of Jobs in India’ report, which expects that by 2022, 37 percent of the workforce will be employed in jobs that have radically changed skill sets compared to the present day. In fact, 9 percent of the workforce will work in new jobs that do not even exist today.

PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE

In the past, India has done well to leverage its strong focus on science and technology to gain a solid foothold in the global IT industry.

To succeed in the future, we need to focus on massive upskilling and reskilling to bring the workforce up to speed. According to a World Economic Forum report, 54 percent of all employees will require significant reskilling and upskilling by 2022; with a large chunk of these needing long-term training (6 months or more).

A lot that can be done right now to prepare for an Ai-led future. At one end, where individuals need to prepare themselves, on the other end, the Government can consider tax incentives to workers toward investment in up-skilling/ re-skilling courses. Additionally, a public-private partnership model where the Government partners with ed-tech companies at a national and state level would also prove to be effective. Also, there need to be efforts to raise awareness about the necessity to gain new skills for the future.

AI and robotics can potentially bring several positive changes, especially in industries like healthcare, banking, manufacturing, retail, entertainment, etc. and predominantly for roles such as Data Scientist, Machine Learning engineer, and Automation engineer amongst others. While change is imminent, how we prepare for the change will define its true impact. And the time to prepare is right now!