Don't look for skilled workers in India: Obama

Washington: US President Barack Obama has said that he does not want US companies to look for skilled and educated workers in India and China in fields like engineering, technology and science. To prevent that, Obama said, he wants to give the school and teachers the resources they need to train and educated students in the US.

"Employers today are looking for most skilled, educated workers. I don't want them to find them in India or China. I want businesses to find those workers right here in the US," Obama said after sending the annual budgetary proposals for the fiscal 2013 to the Congress.

In his State of the Union address last month, Obama had said his administration would offer incentives to those firms which will create jobs in the country.

"The skills and training that employers are looking for begins with the men and women who educate our children," he said while addressing at a community college in a suburb here. The President said he wants the Congress to give the schools the resources to keep good teachers on the job and reward the best.

"In return, they also need to give schools the flexibility to stop just teaching to the test and replace teachers who aren't helping kids learn. That's something that we can do," he said, adding that the Congress needs to stop the interest rates on student loans from doubling this July.

Now is not the time to make school more expensive for young people. And they can act right now to make that change. They also need to take the tuition tax credit that my administration put in the budget over these last few years - a tax credit that saves families thousands of dollars on tuition - and we need to make that permanent, he said.

"It shouldn't be temporary; it should be permanent," he asserted. "So between the increases we've provided in Pell grants, these tax credits, keeping interest rates low. Millions of students across the country have benefited from that," he said.

Obama said tuition inflation has gone up in recent years. "If you can't stop tuition from going up, then funding you get from taxpayers will go down. Because higher education cannot be a luxury; it is an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford. That's part of the American promise in the 21st century," he said.