Ashwini Tiwary is the co-founder and CEO of Autobot India, a leading and growing startup company in the EV domain which provides specialised and customized solutions to the automotive and education sector. Founded by him and his brother in June 2017, Autobot offers Platform as a Service (Paas) in verticals such as learning and development, consulting and Lab infrastructure. During his corporate journey he worked in various roles across functions like marketing, training and consulting, where he worked with companies like Alibaba and some leading startups like Autosports.
The Indian renewable energy sector has been undergoing a positive transformation in the past few years. We have moved the needle from being a nation with aspirations to be a green economy to leading the world with path-breaking innovations in the sector. From electric mobility to wind energy, from rainwater harvesting to reduce the carbon footprint, we have been taking up a lot of initiatives to be carbon neutral.
However, in my opinion, there is a long way to go and we need to gear up to build an extremely capable and creative talent pool to build a sustainable electric future. Here are my thoughts on how can we build a talent pool for the future.
- Academic infrastructure
The academic infrastructure needs to be drastically revamped to be able to support this exponential growth in demand for skills. The NITI Aayog has predicted that by 2030, 30% of new vehicle sales will be electric. This will create a huge demand for Electrical Embedded Engineers, Data Scientists, Electronics engineers, Electromechanical and Electrochemical chemical engineers. Our academic institutions will have to start training the students on skills such as design development, analytics, data science, battery management, safety, vehicle connectivity, smart mobility, and fuel efficiency.
- Catch them young
We have seen young kids of 12 and 14 years building large enterprises, let’s build a conducive environment for learning. We need to bring in Interesting workshops, hackathons, etc, and take them to schools, societies. This would not just build awareness it will also build future customers of EV vehicles.
- Overhaul of education
It is time to look at our curriculum closely especially for Engineering students. If we can add EV to the curriculum now, maybe we may become pioneers of the world in EV, as not only we may have a first-mover advantage we will also have young talent cropping up without bias towards learning as everyone is learning ground up.
Last year, on the occasion of World EV Day, I had pledged to educate and create awareness about zero-emission globally for cleaner and sustainable energy, mobility, and environment. At Autobot, we have been working on various initiatives in line with the above-mentioned thoughts and I’m glad that we have been fairly successful in achieving our targets.