With around 50 lakh internships on offer, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) portal is from where the Centre’s ambitious internship scheme, announced during the budget this July, was born. While the scheme, for which a new portal is being developed under the Corporate Affairs Ministry is likely to be rolled out this October, it was the internship portal launched by the Council amid the pandemic, aimed at bridging industry-academia gap, where the idea was picked from, News18 has learnt.
The AICTE’s National Internship Portal is the first such model that has currently over 75,000 companies listed with it offering internships to students across disciplines. It connects students seeking internships with companies posting such opportunities across the country. The portal run by the AICTE under the Ministry of Education (MoE) was launched in June 2020, from where the idea of a wider internship scheme has originated.
The central government announced a youth internship programme targeting one crore young people in top 500 companies with a stipend of Rs 5,000 a month over the next five years while presenting its full budget for 2024-25. The task has been assigned to the Corporate Affairs Ministry, which is in the process of building a new portal for the same, as well as holding discussions with stakeholders.
According to officials, the Corporate Affairs Ministry’s team developing the new portal has since been in touch with the AICTE and initially had a two-day knowledge sharing session at the Council’s headquarters to get familiar with the dynamics of the portal. Indian higher education has a gap between the theoretical curriculum and the industry expectations regarding on-the-job practical experience, which, as a phenomenon is always dynamic in nature.
Owing to this, many higher education institutions in the country and ultimately students have been facing difficulties in averaging adequate internship opportunities that can contribute to students’ careers and the country’s long-term productivity. This has inadvertently resulted in festering the problem of unemployment and joblessness amongst graduates from smaller cities and less prominent higher education institutions. In order to address this issue, this portal was developed by AICTE.
“The portal was launched in 2020 to bridge the gap between theory and industry expectations for students to get work experience while in college and enhance their employability. Initially, it took some time for industries to sign up, but then eventually it grew well,” said Rajive Kumar, member secretary, AICTE.
According to AICTE data, as of August this year, the portal has a total of 4.7 crore students registered with it, of which 1.98 crore are verified. It has over 11,388 higher education institutions and 75,342 companies registered with it, offering over 50 lakh internships. Their next target is to take the number of internships offered to 1 crore by 2025.
The portal has both government undertakings as well as private firms offering internship opportunities. Some of the major government departments on board include – AICTE, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (MoSJE), Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), Ministry of Cooperation, National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), National Cooperative Development Corporation (NCDC), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY), Indian Knowledge System (IKS) and Department of Technical Education, Maharashtra government, among others.
Private organisations registered on the portal include – Microsoft, OPPO, CISCO, Wiley, NASSCOM, Google, Ansys, IEEE, VMWare, EduSkills, Wadhwani Foundation, MIDAS Research and Development Ltd and RSB power transmission, among others.
Buddha Chandrasekhar, Chief Coordinating Officer, AICTE and CEO, Anuvadini AI, said, “Currently, we have 1.98 crore verified students, of whom we are able to cover 50%-60% with internship opportunities. We monitor the quality and outcome of the internship. Each internship that is offered has to be outcome-based where students are given actual tasks that add value to their experience. Students are given real projects to work on or assist with. One such project being taken up by a government department is to identify and revive water bodies to get rid of waste dumped in around them where students are doing major work on ground and compilation of data. Our data analysis shows that at least 10% (5-6 lakh) of the 50 lakh internships on offer turn into job opportunities.”
Challenges faced
Initially, he said, the major challenge was to build trust in the industry to get them on board. The challenge was at both ends – for companies, the issue was to get students coming from a verified source while for students it was also about an actual company offering real work opportunities for which they did not need to pay anything.
“While building this portal we had manifold discussions with the companies and offered that we will solve their problem of verifying students’ credentials. We have set up a system that students have to get permission from the institute for any internship and also get an approval on the internship letter. Most institutes are now also giving credits for internships. On the other hand, institutes and students were also convinced that through the portal they will only get verified companies and experience of working in a professional space since many students had landed into fraud websites that asked them for a sum of money for an internship or workplaces where they did get an internship certificate, but without allocating any actual work to them. While there is still some hesitation on part of companies, we believe that in some more time it will be smooth,” said Chandrasekhar.
The next target is to get MSMEs on board. “Their business dynamics are such that they are not ready to adopt the internship culture at present. They are key to widening the internship network since the giant companies are fewer in comparison and the smaller ones as well as start-ups can offer only a limited number of opportunities every year. There are around 8 crore MSMEs in India, if they offer two internships each at a given time, there will be 16 crore offers, which exceeds even the number of students that are there in our higher education system. So, the point is that we are working on changing their mindset and getting them on board gradually,” he added.
What interns say
Kashish Rawat, 19, a second-year student pursuing BA Programme from Delhi University’s School of Open Learning (SOL), has a six-month internship with AICTE’s Anuvadini AI app and she looks forward to turning it into a job eventually. “Besides pursuing BA, I had done a digital marketing course from an institute where students had to do an internship to complete the course. I got to know about the portal from a friend and secured an offer to work with the team here itself. I learnt a lot with actual tasks assigned to us on the app. All of this was much more than what I had studied at the institute and the best part is that I also got a stipend of Rs 15,000. I hope to also land a job here once I complete my graduation,” said Rawat, who is based in Delhi’s Seelampur.
Similarly, Bommi Archana, a BTech student from Andhra Pradesh’s Guntur, said that during her final semester she got herself enrolled in an online Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) course offered by AICTE and then a virtual internship, based on which she has now secured a job with Accenture in Bengaluru. “I graduated from college this July. During my final semester, I enrolled in the AI-ML course, to help complete a project. Here in Guntur there are no such internship or job opportunities. Based on the experience gained during the internship, when I applied for a job, they liked my project and I got through,” she said.
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