India: A two-day National Conference on Transforming Vocational Education and Training for Excellence: Perspective and Challenges,being organised by the PSS Central Institute of Vocational Education through virtual mode was inaugurated by Prof. Sridhar Srivastava, Director (I/c), NCERT on 25 March 2021.
In his speech, he emphasized the need to address the issues of vocational education and training and hoped that the deliberations of Conference would be useful in resolving those issues and would also provide directions for the future.
Dr. C Thangaraj, Director NITTR, Bhopal who was the Guest of Honour, spoke about the importance of Green skills and Greening Vocational Education and Training for promoting green jobs and green economy.
Ms Soo-Hyang Choi, Director, UNESCO-UNEVOC, International Centre Bonn, Germany in her video message emphasized that TVET needs to respond to the surging demands of the digital skills and also help the workers who have lost their jobs to reenter the labour market through reskilling and upskilling.
The guests and the delegates were welcomed by Prof. Rajesh P. Khambayat, Joint Director, PSSCIVE. He also gave an overview of the activities of the PSSCIVE and the aims and objectives of the National Conference. The Conference is being attended by around 1000 delegates connected through an online platform and the official youtube channel of PSSCIVE.
The conference is being jointly coordinated by Dr. P. Veeraiah, Dr. V.S. Mehrotra and Mr. A.Palanivel and is supported by the Wadhwani Foundation, Colombo Plan Staff College, Manila and UNESCO-UNEVOC as partners. The handbook of the Conference and guidelines on on-the-job training for school students was released during the inaugural programme of the Conference.