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).

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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.