Need to adopt balanced approach in education: Commerce Secretary

Says should have twinning arrangement with foreign educations

Union Commerce Secretary, Rita A Teaotia, today said that education institutions in the country should take initiatives to see how the $17 billion which Indian students spend outside India for education can be arrested here. She also stressed that it was important to attract foreign students to come to India for studies. She also said foreign institutes should be allowed to operate here and should have twinning arrangement.

Speaking at the interactive work-shop on 'Exports of Entertainment & Education Services from India: Potential & Challenges', organised by FICCI here, the commerce secretary said that to accelerate growth we need to focus on skill.

"We have demographic dividend, people are their, but they are not skilled. We need to focus on see it to it what is it we need to do to bring our young people who got aspiration looking for the opportunities. How is that we can marry the objective of the services sectors, with possibilities of growth in the sector with the education capacity building for this population, so that we create the opportunity for this young people," she said.

Big cause of concern is the fact that large number of students tend to go abroad for education. The perticular export is estimated to be around $17 billion.

"We need not afraid of competition, we already got world class institutions and I think that we have seen that whenever we opened doors for competition, we will be able to stand up. We are strong, we should not be afraid, we should let competition with whatever caveat, with whatever limitations we would like to," said the Commerce Secretary, who gave retail sector as example.

A shorter way, perhaps the intermediate way is to increase twining arrangements and those kind of arrangements is very feasible, it will bring down the cost and they are easy to set up and get running on the field immediately, she added.

According to her, the online education market is other great opportunity and it got huge traction. Not only domestic it is global, where there is a demand for professors from IIT and other institutes.

Another area untapped due to some limitations particularly culture, process and others is bringing students from outside to India. We should create an environment where students from our neighbouring countries, Africa. Live to work and study environment need to provide.

"We must understand that our students are funding major economies for example Australia and UK. Why do we not make sure some of the students population also find comfortable in India," said the commerce secretary, who said Government would give policy support and series of workshops are being conducted to understand what sort of further support can be given.

There are some road map developed for each sector with consultation of industries, these are work in progress and the Ministry will continue to modify and moderate as we consult and continues to evolving, she said.