Affordable Education Is the Biggest Challenge for India’s Knowledge Based Economy: Anish Shrikrishna

Chief Executive Officer of Times Professional Learning, Anish Shrikrishna said, “The  we look at the employability across the spectrum, the skilling of students and how ew solve the problem of affordability and access are some of the core factors that will affect making the economy of India powered by knowledge and skills.”

He stated the above statement in a fireside chat with Ritu Marya, Editor in Chief of Entrepreneur (India and APAC) in the Education and Innovation Summit 2023 in Bengaluru, Karnataka. 

Ritu mentioned that higher education and skilling is going to empower India's knowledge based economy. “We have seen the industry changing, technology is moving into new industries, there is a whole new skill set that is required by people to continue to be job perfect. Otherwise he or she can be redundant in the lack of skills to manage the profession or skill.”

Anish said, replying to which said, “There are two kinds of challenges that we see.One is the unemployability itself and second and the even bigger challenge is underemployment. This means that we have people who apply for jobs which have no  correlation to their education.”

He also mentioned how we are facing the Gross Enrollment Ratio issues. “The government says only 27 per cent of the enrollable students are able to be enrolled which it wants to take to 50 per cent. 

He added that almost three crore students come out of higher education every year and fifty percent of them are unemployable. They are not even going for higher education so you have a serious challenge. 

“There is a very interesting anecdote that I would like to mention here, shared in the Indus Valley Report by Blume. They talked about three Indias, the first constitutes of about a 100 million people who contribute to about a trillion dollars of the Economy, the next is 95 million people who contribute few billion to the economy and third is a billion people who contribute to trillion dollar of the economy, now the migration between these three layers is I think the migration of the knowledge powered economy of India”, said Anish. 

He added that the challenges are very similar in the entire ecosystem. There is an affordability and access challenge at every stage and then there are industries like agriculture in which parents not only find it hard to pay for the education but also for the time period as well. If an earning personal wants a sabbatical for let’s say 1-2 years it is not possible in India even if he wants to scale his career. Therefore, we have to make an ‘earn while you learn’ kind of system. 

Talking about online education, Anish said, “universities have started to pick through private companies like TimesPro. It solves the problem of universities denying their students the lack of study materials or content. These are some of the positive signs that a sector like Education is witnessing now instead of just sticking between the profit and nonprofit.”

He added that the government has done a good thing with the help of New Education Policy and that is democratisation of the degree. Today, even on a 3 G mobile connection, a grocery store vendor’s daughter or a farmer's son can continue to learn while earning and this is a huge leap of faith that the government has taken. 

Various industry leaders including Hari Krishnan Nair, Co-Founder, Great Learning; Shantanu Rooj, Founder and CEO, TeamLease EdTech; Vinod Keni, Managing Partner, IAN Alpha Fund attended the event.