Do you think that online education or an online degree with the formalised degree structure has a way of completely transforming the way we looked at education?

I think so. I think that this mandatory global crash course in digital which COVID has done, brings digital payments by 10 years. India reached a billion monthly payments on UPI in January and we set ourselves a new target at RBI to get a billion daily payments.

My sense is innovation is in combinatorial classrooms. There are four classrooms, you can either have an employer come to your factory, you can go to a classroom, you can do it online and it will also lie in offering full modularity between a three months certificate, one year diploma, two years advanced diploma. So, I think that we are not fully there yet. The technology will get better in the next year one year but the schools have proven in the last 45 days, they have been much more successful users of technology than college and I think because the teachers know the students before and the students know each other. So actually this online has been working well in schools because all the people know each other so I think we'll have to take that reflection into account when we design our next programs. But I think that online education, anytime, anywhere, at your pace, on demand, is the future of education purely just from a cost perspective, if not other.

Manish Sabharwal,
Chairman and Co-Founder of Teamlease Services, India’s largest people supply chain and HR services company