Nasscom chief for setting up special education zones

Radical reforms in the country's education system is the need of the hour, according to Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom).

"The Indian education system is old-fashioned, and bureaucracy has been hindering its development. A better way to rectify this is to take initiatives like setting up special education zones, on the lines of the special economic zones (SEZs), to free it from the control of bureaucrats and regulating bodies," he said.

Delivering the keynote address at a conference on 'IT and BPO outsourcing: A view from both sides' held at the Indian School of Business (ISB) on Monday, he said, "in the present education system, students are not exposed to peer appreciation and peer criticism. Besides, a majority of graduates lack softskills and around 80 per cent of them are not just good in the subjects that they have learnt. And this is causing serious concern of a skills shortage in the industry. Difficulties in attracting and retaining high quality faculty too is another key concern. To overcome this, we need to experiment with the education system by setting up special education zones and enable educational institutions to have flexibility on fees, salaries and curriculum."

According to him, India is expected to generate $60 billion from software exports, and provide employment to around 2 million directly and over 5 million indirectly by 2010.

"The country currently has a shortage of 5,00,000 professionals," he said.

Intl symposium from Jan 5

The fifth international symposium on 'Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)' will be held at the ISB campus from January 5-7, 2007. Theoretical and empirical papers on DEA and other related fields such as econometric methods for efficiency and productivity analysis, including parametric analysis, would be presented at the three-day conference.

Besides, the Centre for Analytical Finance (CAF) at the ISB and the Financial Institutions Centre (FIC) at the Wharton School and the Swedish Institute for Financial Research (SIFR) at Stockholm are holding joint conferences starting from 2007.

The conferences will be annual, held in spring, and rotate between Philadelphia, Stockholm and Hyderabad. 'India's Financial System' is the theme of the first conference, to be held at the Wharton School from April 19 to 21.