Banking on academics.

Or, what one hopes the Academic Bank of Credits will yield.

The concept of an Academic Bank of Credit (ABC) was introduced in the National Education Policy 2020.

ABC aims to allow UG/PG students to open a digital Academic Bank Account in which credits for the courses they undertake get accumulated. They can earn credits through SWAYAM and other institutions. Up to 50% of credits can be from outside the university where the student is enrolled for the degree/diploma.

What a grand idea.

At a time when recovery after learning losses is the biggest worry for stakeholders in the education sector, alarm bells have begun ringing in the MSE space as well. An issue that MSEs face now is the inadequate reading and writing skills required for entry level production jobs. School closures for the past two years are going to make this even more acute in the coming years.

The impact of not having site visits, practical experiments etc which form the backbone of a technical education will be seen sooner. We will likely find a student who was in her first year of a textile engineering degree in February 2020 moving to her final year in a few months without ever having worked on a dyeing recipe at her institute’s lab.

And this is where I hope ABC, if tweaked, will help.

Can the labs of registered institutes be opened up to students living in the same vicinity ? For example, can IIT Delhi’s textile technology department open its labs to students of, say, PSG or DKTE who may be living in and around Delhi?

Another area I hope ABC will help is in improving the quality of learning.

One of basic “questions” at an interview is to show a candidate a picture of a machine that is part of the production process. The answers are quite often (wrong) guesses. Most students would have seen pictures of machines that were in operation 30/50 years ago and are unable to recognise their newer avatars.

For MSEs however this is the pool of candidates available. Their resources are reserved for operations and they have limited capital for upgrades, expansions, incorporation of new technology or employment of well qualified personnel. Add into this mix the relentless brain drain throughout the value chain underlined by the disinterest among freshers and you get a picture of an industry struggling to get talent at every level.

(Oh and I hope someone from IIT Delhi reads every post in the linked Quora thread.)

With ABC, hopefully students at smaller technical institutes will have access to electives/minor area specialisations ( and vital foundation courses!) that would help them grow beyond the limitations of the syllabus.

We might actually create a talent pool that would put its education to work. In textiles!