Infotech will generate 10 million Indian jobs in three years. We need to educate enough candidates
About 11 million students are enrolled in over 18,000 colleges and 350 universities in India — 70 per cent of the nation’s graduates being from the “arts” faculty. In their current state, our universities are not in a position to meet the industry’s skilled resource requirements. Education policies, set in the 1960s, are unsuitable for today’s India, and that of the future. Because the scale is so enormous and given the inadequate investment in education over the last 15 years, graduates often require extra training at the time of employment. The industry has to bear this burden.
India’s IT industry is responsible for creating an education market. It has shown the aspiring middle class that it pays to invest in a child’s education and it has created the demand for educated people. It has also raised salaries all around for the educated class and given it greater bargaining power in terms of compensation.
Many companies today also invest heavily in training new recruits to make up for the deficiencies in the education system. These efforts, however, are nominal compared to the large scale initiatives required of the government, which as the biggest agent of reform needs to take several immediate measures to improve the educational landscape.
The first of these is to provide autonomy to institutions, especially institutions of higher education. In every aspect of the administration of universities, governmental control needs to be relaxed. Today, educational institutions cannot change their courses at will, nor are they in a position to invest in infrastructure or pay their faculty better. That is why almost 30 per cent of faculty positions remain vacant. Many educational institutions are impoverished because they cannot charge higher fees. The relatively well-off and educated middle class reaps the unnecessary benefits of subsidised education while the poor are left behind. Universities must be empowered to charge fees to those who can afford to pay them, and those who cannot should have the benefit of scholarships. A national scholarship scheme would ensure that no young person of merit is deprived of a higher education. It is true that education loans have become easier to get but they are inadequate and the meritorious poor need additional financial support. The government cannot shirk its responsibilities; measures to liberate institutions would go a long way in helping them charter their own mission, raise funds to build capacity, and compete for the best faculty and students.
Over 400,000 students strive for limited IIT and IIM seats annually. Last year, over 50 per cent of the 6,000 IIT seats were reportedly filled by students who had enrolled in expensive coaching classes. This reality has demoralised a lot of bright, young people. It is only when capacity is expanded that education will become accessible to all. Our gross enrolment rate in the age group of 18 to 24 is 11 per cent. If growth is to be sustained, India needs to drive this number up to 25 per cent in the next five years. The investments in capacity building have to come from the taxes that we pay and from fees collected from students who can afford to pay for an education. Universities deprived of funding cannot produce the quality nor the quantity of talent needed to sustain growth in sectors like ours. Some positive changes have been seen in uplifting the quality of primary and secondary education but not as much has been done in higher education, where skill-building becomes most crucial as the youth prepare to enter the job market. This is especially important at a time when companies the world over are entertaining higher expectations from the Indian IT industry in terms of new service offerings and technical expertise. Our competitive advantage can only be sustained if we are producing highly skilled and readily employable graduates.
Today, we are losing almost 1,60,000 Indians to foreign universities and students enrolled in these universities are paying almost $3 billion in fees and costs. It is imperative for the Indian government to strive to retain some of this talent in India, especially those students who are leaving on account of lost opportunities in India. Retaining such students will only be possible if we are giving them access to the same educational resources as those outside the country. Many outstanding foreign universities have expressed interest in establishing branches in India recently. The government must have an open policy towards global universities coming to India to train and educate our students. I do not see why it should object to this, as it benefits young Indians in their own country. We also need to move away from a wrong notion about education belonging to the public sector — foreign universities, accredited private institutions, funded by “edupreneurs”, should also be allowed to come up and compete to attract the best students and faculty.
It is said that for every job that is created in the IT sector in India, four jobs are created in the rest of the economy. Education plays a key role in ensuring an adequate supply of skilled talent. For this momentum to be sustained, active efforts on the part of the government would be
required to reform education.
Comments