Effort Towards Training & Skill Devp Of Life Sciences Talent Pool

India has about 500 recognised universities and 26,000 colleges, some of them holding worldwide ranking (according to agencies conducting ranking surveys).

While these institutions are doing a great job in imparting education of global standards, the structured courses as part of the curriculum are more towards providing knowledge, as compared to technical hands-on training, an important aspect for their industry readiness. This is valid, and in fact more pertinent to the biotechnology industry. Often due to resource intensive nature of the biotechnology/ life science streams, a lot of knowledge is theoretical, with limited resources available to put the theory to practise!

The biotechnology / healthcare industry on the other hand, would prefer candidates who have handson experience with application of the established principles or incumbents who have undergone training to work with high-value instrumentation. Institutions with strong research programmes, as part of their work, ensure their students receive rigorous training on such high-end platform technologies (e.g.Advanced Microscopy, Spectroscopy, Genomics and other-Omics).

However, most of the colleges and even some universities do not have thriving research environment. Recent efforts by Department of Biotechnology and Department of Science & Technology, Ministry of Science & Technology, Government of India, have been to include research as part of curriculum in undergraduate and post-graduate colleges.