Andhra partners with ISB for post-Covid economic revival

Minister for Industries, Information Technology and Skills, M. Goutham Reddy on Wednesday visited the ISB Hyderabad and interacted with key professors to discuss strategies to revive economic growth in the state and come up with a long term roadmap for sustainable development in the state through data-driven policy making.

He expressed his keenness to see a seamless functioning of various departments towards development and urged ISB to come up with a governance model to create a synchronous functioning of departments of development.

The minister also expressed the desire to work together on creating jobs where the labour is, creating quality management structure in government, skill gaps among others.

He also mentioned that an advisory council on development of Andhra Pradesh will be formed with ISB as a nodal agency. Various key areas of engagement were identified to be taken up as project mode including Andhra Pradesh Pulse, an advanced data analytics application using near real-time digital data on citizen interactions with government schemes and systems.

The advisory council will also work to attract investments. It will undertake a comparative analysis of incentives and investment patterns across states. "This will allow Andhra Pradesh to learn from experience across India and structure incentives to make the state more attractive for targeted investment," said an official release.

It will also try to use the skills of returning migrants. The returning migrants are often skilled workers who can be deployed productively in local jobs requiring similar or adjacent skills, which will also contribute to local economic recovery. ISB would like to contribute towards building a system to record the skill sets of returning migrants in order to assess the gap between skills and available jobs in post-pandemic times.

"ISB faculty and students are delighted to collaborate with the Government of Andhra Pradesh on the agenda of inclusive and sustainable development through the JumpStartIndia@ISB initiative. We applaud the spirit of openness and collaboration, and pledge to support the Government of Andhra Pradesh to the fullest extent possible," said Professor Ashwini Chhatre, Associate Professor of Public Policy, ISB.