ISA plans new strategy to fight talent crunch

Speaking to Deccan Herald, ISA Chairman Pradip Dutta, said that ISA is planning a fund to foster innovation and entrepreneurial skills among young students. Further, he said, the ISA executive council was working with the Centre for seed capital and venture capital fund from the Rs 5,000 crore Electronics Development Fund (EDF) proposed by the Department of Information Technology.

Likewise, he said, ISA, as part of four-pronged strategy, was widening its techno-innovation awards on a much larger scale for setting up of small fabless facilities and growth of start-ups. This, he said, would create necessary incentive for young graduates to taking to innovation and entrepreneurial development rather than merely looking at semiconductor industry as a job provider.

The strategies include incubating 50 fabless semicon companies to help them grow to US$200 million by 2020, make India top five destinations for IP creation, and sustain and nurture high-class manpower to double its size to 4,00,000 in next five years.

Employment boom

According to Dutta, though the industry is expected to employ 2,30,000 in 2012, the main challenge was deficient skill-set available for high-end programmers and lack of preference among Indian youth for Application Development & Maintenance (ADM) services as a career option.

Likewise, he said due to lack of product conceptualisation, management and analog design skills, Indian semiconductor design sector, which is expected to touch US$10.6 billion by 2012, is being impeded in taking big leap forward unlike countries like Taiwan, Israel & China.

Further, in order to lower talent deficit, ISA will also be taking the services of the voluntary innovators, on the lines of TiE, for mentoring, hand holding and create start-up. Similarly, he said, ISA was working with universities to finetune their curriculum to match the industry’s requirements and engage knowledge sharing to ensure.

He pointed out that lack of fresh talent supply in terms of expectations of industry and low skill-sets only lead to higher training costs and large gestation period before an engineer becomes productive.