FORMER PUNJAB SPECIAL CHIEF SECRETARY APPEALS TO THE UNION MINISTERS OF ELECTRONICS AND IT, EDUCATION, AND SKILL DEVELOPMENT; WANTS ENGINEERING SYLLABI REWRITTEN WITHIN ONE ACADEMIC YEAR
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India has no single, dated and accountable national programme to reskill its software workforce for artificial intelligence (AI), even as China has placed one on its national calendar, KBS Sidhu, former Special Chief Secretary, Government of Punjab, and Founder-Editor of The KBS Chronicle, has said. He has appealed to the Union Ministers of Electronics and Information Technology, Education, and Skill Development and Entrepreneurship to announce a joint national reskilling mission with a published annual target and one designated owner.
On Saturday, China’s Vice Minister of Human Resources and Social Security, Li Zhong, told a State Council Information Office briefing in Beijing that his ministry would launch a nationwide action to promote employment adapted to AI, under the State Council’s employment plan for 2026–2030 signed in June. KBS Sidhu pointed out that the announcement carried no budget and no targets. “Beijing has not solved the problem. It has named it, dated it and handed it to a ministry. We have schemes in plenty and no single action that is dated, counted and owned,” KBS Sidhu said.
India’s information technology industry employed 5.67 million people as of March 2025. Its core business, KBS Sidhu said, was the sale of trained hands writing and testing code by the hour, which is the very layer of work that AI coding agents now complete in minutes.
“Much of what our engineering colleges teach is a Y2K syllabus. It trained a generation to fix the millennium bug, and it is still training them for that world,” KBS Sidhu said. “The tool that makes a coder redundant can also make him formidable. A trained developer can deliver up to ten times his earlier output on the right task, while an untrained one holding the same licence gains little. The multiplier goes to the trained, not to the merely equipped,” KBS Sidhu said, adding that average gains measured across large firms are far more modest, which is precisely the case for training.
The five-point appeal to the Government of India
1. A national reskilling mission for working technologists, owned jointly by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship with the industry body Nasscom, with a published annual target and an independent audit of what the training is worth.
2. A portable reskilling credit for mid-career workers, usable at any accredited provider.
3. Revision of engineering, BCA and MCA syllabi within one academic year, with the Ministry of Education asking the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the University Grants Commission (UGC) to give boards of studies a deadline.
4. Examinations that permit AI tools and test judgment, such as asking the student to find the fault in machine-written code.
5. Teachers first: retrain the faculty before the students.KBS Sidhu cautioned against discarding the foundations. Semester-long drilling in the syntax of Java and C++ should go, he said, but the fundamentals of programming, algorithms and the flow chart must be taught more rigorously. “Fundamentals were once the route to writing code. They are now the means of auditing it,” KBS Sidhu said. He welcomed the Central Board of Secondary Education’s introduction of Computational Thinking and AI in Classes III to
VIII from the current session, while noting that teacher preparedness remains its weak joint.
States, KBS Sidhu added, need not wait for Delhi. A separate note sets out what Punjab can do with its own institutions.The full piece, “Beijing Reskills, Bengaluru Still Crams Java”, is on The KBS Chronicle: https://kbssidhu.substack.com/p/beijing-reskills-bengaluru-still
