Capacity Building Model

When the students come out of the educational institutions certain capacities are required to be built in them to deal with the real world, particularly to grow in their professional career and participate in the national development. I suggest that the ingredients for capacity building must be embedded right from the beginning of the students’ life from primary education to higher education. A good educational model is the need of the hour to ensure that the students developed as enlightened citizens and also participate in national development missions.

For participating in the nation building tasks: the capacities required to be built among the students in their formative years by the educational institutions are: The capacity for research or inquiry; the capacity for creativity and innovation; the capacity to use high technology; the capacity for entrepreneurial leadership; and the capacity for moral leadership.

a. Research and enquiry: The 21st century is about the management of all the knowledge and information we have generated and the value addition we could bring to it. We must give our students the skills with which they find a way through the sea of knowledge that we have created and continue with life long learning. Today we are empowered by technology to teach ourselves beyond classrooms and become life-long learners. This is indeed required for sustained economic development of the nation and also individual prosperity.

b. Creativity and Innovation: The management of knowledge in the 21st century is beyond the capacity of a single individual. The amount of information that we have around is overwhelming. The management of knowledge therefore must move out of the realm of the individual and shift into the realm of the networked groups. The students must learn how to manage knowledge collectively and to work in multi-disciplinary teams. When the information is networked the power and utility of the information grows multifold as predicted by Metcalfe's law. An information that is static does not grow. In the new digital economy, information that is circulated across enterprise, creates innovation and eventually contributes to national wealth.

c. Capacity to use high technology: Every student in our schools and colleges should be brought in contact with technology to aid their learning process. Educational institutions should be equipped with adequate computing equipment, laboratory equipments, Internet facilities with high band width connectivity and provide an environment for the students to enhance their learning ability. In the midst of all of the technological innovations and revolutions we cannot think that the role of the teachers will be diminished. In fact the teacher will become even more important and the whole world of education will become teacher assisted and would help in “tele-porting” the best teacher to every nook and corner of the country and propagate the knowledge. The teacher becomes a facilitator and knowledge manager. For full utilization of the available connectivities through satellite, high band width optical fibre communication in conjunction with technologies like Wi-max, the most critical aspect is the availability of quality content. I would suggest all the experts here to address this important issue and evolve a time bound action plan so that the quality content is made available at nodal points for access by the students, teachers and desiring learners.

d. Entrepreneurship: The aptitude for entrepreneurship should be cultivated right from the beginning and in the educational environment both in the Schools and the Colleges. We must teach our students to take calculated risks for the sake of larger gain, but within the ethos of good business. They should also cultivate a disposition to do things right. The inner being must be illuminated with righteousness. This capacity will enable them to take up challenging tasks later.

f. Moral leadership: Moral leadership involves two aspects. First it requires the ability to have compelling and powerful dreams or visions of human betterment. Moral leadership requires a disposition to do the right thing and influence others also to do right things. There is a need for inclusion of "moral science" class as a part of education in all the schools and colleges. This is essential for promotion of value based education leading to enlightened citizenship.

For building capacity it is essential to increase the teacher – student ratio, improve the quality of teachers, provide continuous methods for upgradation and provide them with technology aids for becoming life long autonomous learners. The experts assembled here may try to review the type of capacity building needed in teaching based on their experiences.

So far we have discussed about the Education scene in the country, the necessity of Global Human Resource Cadre leading to productive employment generation, and the necessity of capacity building among the students to meet the demand in the Global Competitive environment. Fundamental to all these things is imparting quality and value based education in the schools. Particularly, primary education is a very important component in the pursuit of higher education and capacity building. Quality input to higher education leads to generation quality human resource.