| The President of India is either George Bush or Atal Behari Vajpayee. Arundhati Roy won the Nobel prize in literature.
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| Satyajit Ray also won a Nobel prize. The capital of Uttaranchal is Jharkhand. These statements must have left you confused?
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| These were some of the answers by graduates applying for the post of marketing executive at a leading company in Ahmedabad.
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| The company officials are now in fix whether they should recruit few of these candidates or simply wait till they get a fresh lot of applicants.
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| Finding skilled manpower is proving to be difficult in Gujarat, given the poor education standards in the state. People from other parts of the country also prefer to stay away from the state fearing more riots and natural calamities.
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| That is the reason why Gujarat has failed to become an information technology hub despite having one of the best bandwidth connections in the country, better road connectivity than most other parts of India and uninterrupted power supply.
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| “We have been looking for people in senior positions for the last few months. But we have not found a suitable candidate from Gujarat. People from outside the state do not want to work here owing to fears of more riots, earthquakes etc. Moreover, the standards of education here are poor,” said a senior official of the Rs 2700 crore Torrent group.
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| “As we do not encourage people to work here leaving their family in their native states, things are getting difficult for us _ specially when we are looking to expand.
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| “We all know that the riots were only for a few months and that natural calamities are not predictable, but good candidates from other states are not ready to settle in Gujarat. They also site the low standard of education and the lack of good professional institutes in the state. Though IIM-Ahmedabad is among the best IIMs in the country, not everyone can study at IIM,” added the official, requesting anonymity.
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| Gujarat has 31 ports including the Kandla port, which is the second largest port in the country, and the Mundra and Pipavav ports.
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| However, there is no institute in the state teaching port management or marine engineering. Automobile giant General Motors has its main plant at Halol, but there is no institute to offer courses in automobile engineering.
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| There are private management and technical colleges mushrooming across the major cities in the state but many of these lack approval from the concerned authority like the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE).
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| Premier institutions like the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad and the National Institute of Design (NID) have limited seats and students across the country vie for berths in these institutions.
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| Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi admitted that there was a problem of quality manpower in the state.
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| “I admit that there is a shortage of quality manpower and educational institutions in the state and we are working to address the issue. Reliance Industries has already opened the DA-IICT (Dhirubhai Ambani - Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gandhinagar). I have requested corporate houses to start institutes on port management and marine engineering. General Motors has also been requested to open an automobile engineering college in Gujarat,” Modi said.
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| He assured that the state will have an exclusive institutes for courses in port management and marine engineering in the next one year.
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| Regarding the automobile engineering college, GM is yet to respond to Modi’s call.
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| “If we want to enter into the service sector, HRD is a very big issue and we have to be ready for that. We need to spread quality education to students in Gujarat. The lack of good English education is delaying our progress in specialised sectors like IT,” added Modi.
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| Even as the Gujarat government is making big plans for biotechnology, corporates are not very enthusiastic as they will face problems in getting the right manpower.
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| “There are a few good colleges coming up in the Gujarat but the state stills lacks in quality education. We are forced to look outside the state for skilled manpower, specially in fields like IT and biotechnology. We hope things will improve in near future as the government have started taking some steps to address the problem,” said a senior official of Cadila Pharmaceuticals.
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| JB Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals, which has its export oriented plant in Panoli (Bharuch district) is setting up an R&D centre in Maharashtra.
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| “We have almost everything in Gujarat but scientists and experts in biotechnology are not interested in living in the state,” a senior official of the pharma major said.
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| The big question for the state government is: Given the manpower constraints, will investors be interested in setting up ventures in the state, Global Summit or no Summit? |
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