SME Times News Bureau | 15 Feb, 2020
Vice President M.
Venkaiah Naidu Saturday said that MSMEs face challenges in technology adoption
and called upon the youth to come up with innovative ideas to address the
problems faced by the country.
Naidu said that
MSMEs face more challenges as compared to bigger corporations in adoption of
new technologies and exhorted the institutions such as IIITDM to address this by
creating professionals who specialize in ‘Smart Manufacturing’.
Addressing the
students and faculty of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design
& Manufacturing (IIITDM), Jabalpur the Vice President said that youngsters
should come up with ideas on how to best use technology for easing people’s
lives and bring transparency in governance.
He further said
that our aim should be to build an inclusive society in which every person
feels integrated in nation’s development.
Exuding confidence
that India was well on way to become the five trillion-dollar economy, Naidu
called upon the youth to develop positive outlook towards life.
“It is very
important to succeed in life as it gives you new energy and dynamism”, he said.
The Vice President
said that technology is changing by day and there is increased digitization in
every field.
However, he
expressed concern over the low levels of digital literacy, specially in rural
India. He called for sustained efforts to increase digital literacy and
suggested special focus at the school/college level.
Naidu also called
for creating more digital content in Indian languages.
“If the benefit of
digital technology and e-governance have to reach the last man, it has to be in
Indian languages”, he said and exhorted the students and academia to work for
creating more digital content in Indian language, terming it as their
‘Digital Social Responsibility’ towards the society and nation.
The Vice President
also said we should gradually move towards education and research in mother
tongue.
Naidu also called
for making cyber security an inalienable part of all our digital literacy
programs. This would help in faster adoption of technologies, he said.
Discussing various
challenges and opportunities on the economic front, the Vice President
expressed concerns that India despite being world’s fifth largest manufacturer,
share of manufacturing in our GDP has remained around 16 percent.
“Our aim is to
increase this share to 25 percent of GDP”, the Vice President said while
listing various government initiatives to promote manufacturing such as Make in
India, Start-up India, MUDRA and Stand-up India, easy availability of credit to
MSMEs and setting up of industrial corridors.
Asking
universities to prepare the youth for 21st century industry needs,
he said that with right skills, Indian youth can not only increase the pace of
economic growth in India but also would be available to other countries in the
world.
“With 65 percent
of population below the age of 35 years, India has the right demographic
capital to emerge as skill capital of the world”, he said.
However, the Vice
President cautioned that mere degrees and diplomas will not make a person
employable and emphasized the need for skilling to take full advantage of the
opportunities in the globalised and liberalized economic environment.
“Skilling and
schooling should go together”, he said.
Expressing disappointment
over the fact that none of the Indian universities figures in the top 100
global institutions, he called for concerted efforts to improve the teaching
methods and the learning outcomes.
Exuding confidence that India was well on path to
becomethe five trillion-dollar economy, VP said that incentivizing the research
and innovation would be key to achieve this target.
Praising the government’s move to set up more
than 5400 Atal Tinkering Labs in schools across the country, he called upon all
educational institutions to promote the spirit of innovation and
entrepreneurship among the students.
Shri Naidu also stressed the need to take the
students out of the classrooms and provide them exposure to real life working
environment in the industry.
“There should be more industry-academia linkage
to enable this”, he said.
Stressing the need
to raise the expenditure on Research and Development, VP appealed to the
private sector to spend reasonable share on research and development and join
hands with the Universities. He even called for the creation of a separate
corpus by the corporate sector to promote cutting edge research in higher
education institutions and universities.
Commenting on the
behavior of the people’s representatives in the Parliament and state
legislatures, Shri Naidu asked them to raise the level of debates in the House
and set the example for others.
“Discuss, debate
and decide in true spirit of democracy”, he advised the Parliamentarians.