Since we are discussing education, I had done a blog post on how tech can (and is) transforming education in India. The Govt's initiative is
doing as lot more than Ponzi schemes like Byju.
https://rpdeans.blogspot.com/2024/03/th ... unity.html
That said, I was considered for a govt role in handling the Atal Innovation mission (when the govt was looking at hiring lateral inductees
into the civil service). I was not interested as I had seen first hand that it was not really working on the ground. The same goes for Skill India.
Under AIM, select schools have a `Atal Tinkering lab' financed by the govt. In theory, this will give students a chance to build prototypes, get
advanced concepts in STEM etc. Each school was to have a mentor from industry, along with a dedicated staff.
I was chosen as one such mentor. After a lengthy process to get the right fit with a school, I was given a school in rural Karnataka, though I wanted
an English medium school in Bangalore and was not comfortable in Kannada. I then got a private school in Bangalore, which kept putting me off, till
I discovered that they had misappropriated the money and there was no lab. I was given a 3rd school, which was genuine, but already had 2 mentors, which the school was not happy with and did not want another. People in AIM do not respond to feedback and there is no impact study on what this has achieved. It appears that the contractors who install the labs (with 3D printers, computers etc) have govt connections. Once a ATL was financed on paper, the govt's job was done.
Similarly, under `Skill India', the concept is good (train people for a useful trade). As someone who wanted to hire a lot of such people when I ran a company I found out that the skilling centres (in Gurgaon/Delhi) back in 2015, when they were first set up, were typically owned by those with contacts. The students barely got training. This was just a placement center, where the likes of my company found it easier to recruit instead of job portals. Students paid for placement, which is how the centers made money. A CAG audit for 2014-5 flagged similar issues (conflict of interest and non achievement of targets by skilling centers funded by govt). While these could have been teething problems, another audit covering 2016-7
showed there was not much difference. Barely 12% of those trained got a job (and 1.5% got a job they wanted).
One such example from that time:
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/i ... 2018-09-20. CBNs involvement in a similar scam in AP was really just scaling up of the ability to cheat a system when a lot of money is thrown at an initiative with little monitoring on the ground.
The larger point I want to make is that for years, the govt has been more excited by fancy acronyms and schemes (Stand up India, AIM,
Skill India' etc) without seeing if this is making a real difference. This was not the way genuinely successful schemes like Swachh Bharat were
executed.