Vijayawada: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu on Monday launched 17 skill development centers across the state from here electronically.

The centres, being set up by the Skill Development Corporation of Andhra Pradesh at various educational institutions, are aimed at imparting training and honing the skills of youth. In a virtual interaction with students across the state, the Chief Minister also underlined the need for pursuing "student-driven courses instead of college-driven courses."

"Students should have a choice in selecting courses with various combinations, and educational institutions should not force students to pick courses being offered by them," he said, adding that students should get more practical knowledge than the classroom orientation.

Naidu said the purpose behind setting up the Skill Development Corporation (SDC) is to gather contents of various educational courses being offered all over the world and provide such information to students online.

"A committee of experts would be constituted to guide the students in selection of course at the time of entering college and also in providing the source of information for employment," Naidu said.

He said the proposed panel and the SDC would provide counselling to students on the selection of course and on combination of subjects from class XI.

"The future is only for knowledge and not for (mere) hard work. Prime Minister Narendra Modi plans to turn the nation into 'Digital India' and AP is gearing up to catch his ideas to become the number one in knowledge," Naidu said, adding the country has huge concentration of human resources than any other nation and can lead the world in knowledge-based issues in future.

Naidu also appealed to students to develop mobile applications which can be utilised by government in achieving good governance. He also underlined that state government is currently using 600 such apps which are developed indigenously by students. Union minister Bandaru Dattatreya was also present.

In a separate function, Naidu flagged off 2,387 police vehicles here, which will be allocated to all 13 districts as per their requirements.

State DGP J V Ramudu said the Police Transport Organisation has procured these vehicles, including two-wheelers and four-wheelers and six-wheelers, at the cost of Rs 100 crore. The police department donated Rs 8.13 crore towards the 'Hudhud' cyclone relief on the occasion with Ramudu handing over a cheque of Rs 8,13,16,186 to the chief minister.

"The amount was contributed by the police department officials and staff from their salaries," the DGP said.

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