This scholarship fund is aimed at skilling motivated individuals in relevant areas and equip them with industry-relevant knowledge : Ronnie Screwvala

Entertainment and media industry veteran Ronnie Screwvala, who runs online education start-up Upgrad, has launched a Rs100 crore fund which will provide scholarships to professionals seeking to enhance their skills through online courses. 

“We need 125 million young Indians in post-graduation studies and not more than 30 million today are engaged in higher studies as a majority of them need to start working early in their career and so online Learning/Education is the real answer for India. Along with our need to Up Skill, we need to Up Smart too in order to make our core demographic employable “says Ronnie Screwvala as his reason for launching this Fund.

Recent reports from IDFC and World Economic Forum have highlighted huge contradictions as almost 75% of Graduates (mostly under grad) are unemployable and on the other side 48% of Indian Employers have difficulty filling their jobs with the right people. 

This is Asia’s first and largest Online Scholarship Fund with a first closing of Rs 100 crore and a target of Rs 400 crore in the next three-four years. The initiative will start with an initial corpus of Rs 10 crore from Screwvala and will grant scholarships ranging from Rs 25,000 to Rs 2 lakh. 

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“The offline-only approach to education is fantastic but too expensive and capital intensive and not scalable and trained faculty will remain our permanent backlog. Our Indian Judiciary needs many more Judges and our Education system many more trained faculty but it’s too big a problem for us to be log jammed as we will miss the global – and online allows the best of Faculty to share and address this challenge at Scale while they continue their off line teaching too. This Scholarship Fund is aimed at skilling-motivated individuals in relevant areas and equip them with industry-relevant knowledge. It is to prepare them for what’s to come, so that they are in-tune, updated and equally adaptive to industry changes, and of course the penny has to drop with Employers too that Online is a viable credible option for recruitment and to address their challenges”, concludes Screwvala.

Image courtesy: Indian Express | Source: Press Release