Mumbai: BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has decided to provide skill development training to school students in various trades such as Electronics, Hotel Management, Apparel, Fashion Designing, Food service, Health and hygiene, Automobile, Tourism and Hospitality.
The certificate courses for these vocations will be part of BMC's secondary schools' curriculum. In its budget for 2023-24, the civic body has allocated Rs. 28.45 crore for the programme، which will be rolled out in phased-manner, starting with 41,774 class 9 and 10 students at 249 schools in the city.
New initiative in line with NEP
According to BMC, the initiative is in line with the National Education Policy (NEP)'s objective of making students self-reliant through skill education. For this purpose, BMC has last year signed an agreement with various state government departments and bodies.
Municipal Commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal said, "The state skill development and entrepreneurship minister Mangal Prabhat Lodha took a stock of our schools and observed that students are forced to drop-out after schools as they don't have any vocational training. Besides, Chief Minister Eknath Shinde has also instructed us to impart vocational education to high school students."
Aim to make students future ready
The schools with training programmes will be renamed as 'Mumbai Public Schools and Skill Centres'. A 'Skill Centre' will be set up at the Jagannath Shankarseth School to monitor all the skill education schools.
"We are not talking about traditional trades like welders etc but other courses like coding, robotics, tourism, artificial intelligence, hospitality to name a few. The students will be able to pursue these skills according to their interest and they will be ready for employment after stepping out of school. They can pursue engineering, medical or whatever they want, but it will be much easier for them to get a job. Students learning in private schools won't be as ready as BMC school students for jobs," said Chahal.
