Andhra Pradesh

A feather in Jawahar Knowledge Centres' cap

R. Ravikanth Reddy

EducationPlus Knowledge of important soft skills, inter-personal skills and an overall personality development has ensured students comfortable jobs in reputed companies.

Two years is a short time for a new concept to succeed and pay rich dividends, more so when the target group is students still in teens and come from a traditional background with little knowledge in emerging technologies. The concept in discussion is the Jawahar Knowledge Centres (JKCs) and their incredible success within a couple of years of their establishment.

To place all the 1,066 candidates in reputed companies is no small achievement and the JKCs did just that. All the first batch students have been offered placements by the IT industry including big players like Infosys and IBM. However, only 866 have opted to join with the rest planning to go for higher studies.

The switch over to "Learning by doing mode" from the practiced "Learning by listening" mode seems to have made the difference to these students, who a few years ago, could not have believed the transformation they have undergone after joining the JKCs while in their engineering course. Mere knowledge of subjects was of no use and the importance of soft skills, inter-personal skills and an overall personality development ensured that they landed in comfortable jobs. Sujana, who was inducted into Intelli group and Prateema who got into Satyam computers vouch for it.

The president, Institute of Electronic Governance (IEG) and the brain behind the concept, Ghanta Subba Rao feels the success opened a new phase of life for girl students from little known colleges.

Rigorous training

The JKCs were started inducting 1,066 women of final semester from 102 different colleges and trained rigorously in industry grade skills for 12 hours a day.

The training followed a pre-planned schedule under the guidance of mentors in the average ratio of 10:1 in teams.

The success, according to Dr. Rao, was due to the student-centric and "learning by doing" concept. Following the success of JKC concept, the Government issued a G.O., interestingly the first G.O. of this year that aims at making JKC a major player in promoting IT in the State and IEG coordinating the process.

It spells out guidelines for interaction between the Andhra Pradesh State Council for Higher Education, Department of Higher Education, Collegiate Education, IEG and various Universities.

Dr. Rao said the success of JKCs was evident the way the colleges have sent in requests to start them.

From the initial 32 centres they have grown to 44 now with 1400 odd students inducted from 160 colleges across the State.

Another 26 are in pipeline and likely to get nod soon. All the districts have been covered except Adilabad and Srikakulam.

They have been opened to boys this year and entry has been restricted to toppers from every participating college in five engineering disciplines while the remaining seats were filled on merit from various parts of the State.

Traditional courses

Realising the stupendous opportunities in the ITES sector, JKCs are now being opened for traditional degree courses on pilot basis in 11 centres across the State including Vishakapatnam, Rajahmundry, Guntur, Khammam, Nalgonda, Karimnagar, Chittoor, Kadapa, Ananthapur, Kurnool and one in Hyderabad.

Dr. Rao said the colleges have been identified and orders have also been issued.

Entry will be through a competitive test to be held next week and candidates would go to JKCs after their final exams.

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