Naidu calls upon youth to come up with innovative ideas

Speed Post News Network

New Delhi : The Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu on February 15, 2020, called upon the youth to come up with innovative ideas to address the problems facing the country. Addressing the students and faculty of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design & Manufacturing (IIITDM), Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, Naidu said that youngsters should come up with ideas on how to best use technology for easing people’s lives and bring transparency in governance.

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, according to a PIB release. The Vice President said that technology is changing by day and there is increased digitisation in every field. However, he expressed concern over the low levels of digital literacy, specially in rural India and 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. He also called for making cyber security an inalienable part of all our digital literacy programmes.

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,” he 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.

Naidu said that MSMEs face more challenges compared to bigger corporations in adoption of new technologies and exhorted the institutions such as IIITDM to address this by creating professionals who specialise in ‘Smart Manufacturing’. 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, Naidu said.

However, the Vice President cautioned that mere degrees and diplomas will not make a person employable and emphasised the need for skilling to take full advantage of the opportunities in the globalised and liberalised 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. Praising the government’s move to set up more than 5,400 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.