For the paradox of an acute shortage of skilled personnel and a rising tide of unemployed youth which defines the Indian economy, the country’s academy is increasingly – and – rightly being faulted:  Dilip Thakore

Although according to spokespersons of the ruling BJP-led NDA government in New Delhi the Indian economy has the highest rate of GDP growth worldwide – a claim not quite supported by the indices of industrial, agriculture production and services and export data – there’s an ominous shadow looming over the nation.

India’s demographic profile – 242 million youth are in the 15-24 age group – indicates that 12 million enter the employment market every year. Against this, employment generation in the economy despite doubling of the annual rate of GDP growth after the historic liberalisation and deregulation Union budget of 1991, has averaged 5.5 million jobs per year. Therefore a huge backlog has built up over the years. According to Census 2011, the number of registered educated unemployed aggregated a massive 47 million.

But two years on, the acche din (good days) and vikaas (development) economic policies promised by former three-term Gujarat chief minister and incumbent prime minister Narendra Modi – a promise that prompted the electorate to vault the BJP into power at the Centre with the largest majority of any political party since 1985 in General Election 2014 – haven’t yielded jobs anywhere near that scale.

According to a statement made in Parliament on August 10 last year by Union labour minister Bandaru Dattatreya, 357,000 “employment opportunities” (jobs) were generated in fiscal 2014-15 and 41,000 under the Prime Minister™s Employment Generation Programme (PMEGP) in the first quarter of 2015-16, a figure nowhere near the 1 million jobs per month which need to be generated within the economy. Moreover, as per a news report in the Indian Express (April 15), “new jobs in eight sectors of the economy – textiles, leather, metal, automobiles, gems and jewellery, transport, information technology and handlooms – fell to a six-year low of 135,000 in 2015 as against 4.21 lakh jobs in 2014 and 4.19 lakh in 2013. This is also the worst record of new jobs in October-December quarter in the last six years. The next quarter was no better with the number of jobs generated by these critical labour-intensive industries rising fractionally to 1.35 lakh, according to a report in Livemint (May 11).

Even the few million jobs generated by Indian industry and particularly the services sector which currently contributes over half of the country’s annual GDP, aren’t really jobs at all, and disguise massive under-employment. Describing the operations of Frontline, a highly successful Patna-based manpower recruitment firm with annual sales of $185 million (Rs.1,246 crore), in a prescient feature story, the London-based weekly The Economist (May 11, 2013) commented: “Yet Frontline is also a symptom of a colossal failure. For it is not supplying labour for a manufacturing boom of the kind that helped so many in China, South Korea and Taiwan out of poverty, or for the IT services at which India has excelled. Instead it offers relatively unproductive service-sector jobs ” in particular, security guards. It has become de rigueur for every ATM, office, shop and apartment building to have guards. Across India millions of young men now sit all day on plastic seats in badly fitting uniforms with braids and epaulettes, unshaven and catatonically bored as the economic miracle passes by. This isn’t how East Asia got rich.”

Although employment generation is mainly the outcome of conceptualisation and implementation of economic, monetary and fiscal policies, the country’s education, particularly higher education system, has a major role to play. This is especially true of the Indian economy defined by the paradox of an acute shortage of skilled personnel and a rising tide of unemployed youth. For this anti-social denouement which has alarming socio-economic consequences, the country’s educators from kindergarten to postgraduate levels are increasingly – and rightly – being faulted. The plain, unvarnished truth is that post-independence India’s education policy formulators, the academy and teachers’ community have conspicuously failed to overhaul syllabuses, curriculums and pedagogies for the country’s 1.4 million schools, 38,000 colleges and 800 universities to adequately fulfil the needs of academia, government, industry, commerce, agriculture or the services sector.

In its National Employability Report – Engineers 2016, the Delhi-based Aspiring Minds Assessment Pvt. Ltd (estb.2007), “an employability evaluation and certification company” which publishes annual reports after measuring the learning outcomes of professional college graduates (hotel managers, engineers etc), comments: “We did the previous large-scale study of employability of engineers in 2014. We had found that only 18.43 percent of engineers were employable for the software services sector, 3.21 percent for software products and 39.84 percent for non-functional roles such as business process outsourcing. Unfortunately, we see no massive (sic) progress in these numbers. These numbers as of today stand at: 17.91 percent, 3.67 percent and 40.57 percent respectively for IT services, IT products and business process outsourcing… We are not inferring that all initiatives for employability improvement have failed and there may be pockets of excellence present.

However, the need of the hour is to find these pockets and scale them up to make an exponential impact on employability. This is crucial for India to continue its growth story and achieve the prime minister’s vision of India becoming the human resource provider for the whole world.”

Comments Varun Agarwal, co-promoter and chief technical officer of Aspiring Minds: “There’s a huge need for a curriculum revamp (in academia) to bring in new teaching methods and technology. The science of manufacturing has moved way ahead, but our colleges and universities continue to teach outdated concepts to students. For India to become the world’s manufacturing hub, our higher education institutions need to have knowledge-driven managements and new pedagogies employing cutting-edge education technologies.”

This glaring failure of post-independence India’s educators and the academy has been compounded by myopic neglect of education by the political class, which has paid scant attention to developing the country’s abundant and high-potential human resources. Despite the global average annual expenditure on education being 5 percent of national GDP and over 7 percent in the developed OECD countries, annual outlays (Centre plus states) for education in post-independence India have never risen to more than 4 percent per annum, averaging a mere 3.5 percent for the past 68 years.

With public primary-secondary education being free-of-charge and tuition fees in government colleges and universities covering barely 5 percent of institutional expenditure, India’s higher education institutions are thoroughly run-down and defined by obsolete syllabuses and pedagogies, severe faculty shortages and infrastructure decay.

While India Inc, which has taken the easy option of copying and reverse engineering manufactures and products of developed countries and paid minimal attention to research and innovation, is guilty of contributory negligence, the greater share of the blame for the sorry condition of Indian academia has to be laid at the doorstep of the country’s educators. As indicated by the Aspiring Minds report referred to above, and several other authoritative studies (NASSCOM-McKinsey World Institute 2005), it’s hardly an exaggeration that the Indian academy is characterised by outdated syllabuses, archaic pedagogies, abysmal learning outcomes and research and innovation aversion. Proof of this is that not even one of India’s 800 universities – some of them established over 150 years ago – is ranked among the Top 100 in the World University Rankings published by London-based rating agencies Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE). On the other hand, several Chinese, Korean and other south-east Asian universities are ranked in the Top 100 league tables of both agencies.

“There is a huge and unfortunately widening gap between Indian industry and academia. India’s colleges and universities are churning out a large number of standardised youth through delivery of outdated, deterministic curriculums whereas 21st century India needs multi-disciplinary graduates who are prepared for career shifts because industry the world over is experiencing fast and furious change. Companies and corporates need graduates with well-developed cognitive and problem-solving skills.

Although it’s not the function of universities to customise graduates for industry, it’s time for better connectivity between these two vitally important institutions. To build strong links, I believe the composition of governing boards of academic institutions can play a major role. If industry leaders with respect for academic teaching and research are represented – as they are in ISB and Ashoka University – they can play an important role in ensuring industry-academia cooperation”, says Pramath Sinha, an alumnus of IIT-Kanpur and University of Pennsylvania, USA and first dean of the blue-chip Indian School of Business, Hyderabad (estb.2001) and promoter-trustee of the highly-regarded liberal arts, Ivy-league style Ashoka University, Sonipat (estb.2014).

Niti Sharma, vice president of the Bangalore-based Teamlease Services Pvt. Ltd, the country’s largest temping and placements company which claims to hire an individual every five minutes, is also of the opinion that the industry-academia gap is widening for which she blames the academy. “The syllabuses of India’s higher education institutions are out of sync with even the basic technical and soft skills required by industry. In India’s colleges and universities there’s too much emphasis on theoretical and textbook study, almost to the total exclusion of application-based learning. Moreover, career counselling to ensure that students opt for temperamentally and aptitudinally suitable higher education and careers is completely missing in all higher education institutions except a handful. Industry and academia need to urgently engage and interact to jointly develop internship, apprentice and applied research programmes to develop the country’s vast human capital”, says Sharma, an economics and business management graduate of Mumbai and Symbiosis International universities, and co-promoter of Teamlease Services (estb.2002).

Nevertheless, despite her dissatisfaction with the lack of development energy in Indian academia, Sharma discerns some green shoots of co-operation. She derives some comfort from Indian industry’s belated discovery of vocational and skills education. “The majority shareholding in the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) established in 2009, is of private sector industry. Under the aegis of NSDC private companies have established 35 sector skill councils which have prescribed norms and standards for vocational education institutes to train and certify skilled workers. This is a very positive development and will inspire greater industry-academia interaction. In my opinion industry should be involved in education in varying degrees right from the primary to postgraduate stages, as is normative in European countries”, says Sharma.

And the Teamlease Services management has gone beyond mere lip service to promote Teamlease Skills University (estb.2013) in Vadodara (Gujarat) which is working in close collaboration with India Inc to bridge the national skills gap. In this context, it’s pertinent to note that a mere 6 percent of India’s 400 million workforce has received formal vocational education and training cf. 20 percent in China and 80 percent in Germany.

Likewise, Anindya Mallik, partner of the Gurgaon-based Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (India) Pvt. Ltd who heads the education and skills development practice of this well-known audit, financial advisory, human capital development, operations, tax and technology services company, an affiliate of Deloitte, New York, believes that the syllabuses and curriculums of Indian academia are “substantially misaligned” with industry requirements. According to him, higher education institutions are completely unaware of the importance of teaching soft skills such as communication and teamwork. Nevertheless, like Sharma, he also draws comfort from India Inc’s belated discovery of skills education.

“FICCI, CII, Assocham and other chambers of commerce are beginning to reach out to the country™s education institutions. The sector skill councils established by NSDC have received excellent endorsement from companies encouraged by chambers of commerce. A growing number are inviting interns and apprentices and even engaging with colleges and universities to design syllabuses and courses. Moreover, recently the HRD ministry permitted corporates to take over and run some government-promoted ITIs (Industrial Training Institutes). Slowly but surely, the gap between industry and academia is closing”, says Mallik.

Curiously, there seems little regret within Indian industry or academia about the time and opportunities lost in making this mutually beneficial connect which has cost the country dear in terms of a drought of inventions, innovations, knowledge creation and rock-bottom industrial and agricultural productivity. Decades of protectionism of India Inc behind high tariff walls during the heyday of Nehruvian socialism almost totally destroyed the competitive spirit of the captains of Indian industry who were content to reap huge profits under the protective umbrella of neta-babu licence-permit-quota raj, and monopolies and oligopolies it tacitly encouraged.

The consequence was that in the mid-1980s, the Indian economy like the Soviet economy from which it drew much inspiration, was on the brink of collapse forcing the historic liberalisation and deregulation initiative of the Narasimha Rao government. But even though GDP growth has doubled since then, India Inc is a hopeless also-ran in the newly emergent global market for sophisticated goods and services.

Similarly, protected from foreign and domestic competition by a coterminous licence-permit-quota regimen in academia, and dominated by leftist academics teaching gobbledegook ‘Indian economics’ and propagandising the imaginary growth and achievements of capital-intensive public sector companies entrusted to business-illiterate bureaucrats and over-promoted government clerks, the Indian academy also languished and atrophied. With government (Centre plus states) outlays for education seldom exceeding 3.5 percent of GDP (against the global average of 5.5 percent) and tariff walls-protected titans of India Inc uninterested in funding research, the academy transformed into a mirror image of the country’s giant bureaucracy which has ruined the high-potential Indian economy.

Bureaucratic inertia which is asphyxiating the academy, is compounded by the country’s ill-defined, patchwork medium of instruction policy. Ever since post-independence India’s federation of states was ill-advisedly reorganised on the basis of dominant languages in 1956 and education became a state government subject, the latter have made a mess of education systems within their jurisdiction.

Proclaiming deep love for their native vernacular languages, but actually driven by money-making opportunities in teacher appointments for kith and kin, and textbooks writing and printing rackets, most state governments have actively discouraged the learning of English, even in secondary education despite being well aware that it is the country’s link language, and the language of business and the judicial system. In the process, state governments countrywide dominated by ill-educated populist politicians given to stoking linguistic chauvinism, have ruined the lives and employment prospects of hundreds of millions of post-independence India’s children.

“Millions of youth across the country enter colleges and universities with very under-developed English language communication and soft skills which makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for them to derive the full benefit of higher education. According to a recent report, 96 percent of research papers submitted to the renowned US-based academic journals and textbooks publisher John Wiley & Sons by Indian Ph D students are rejected because they are incomprehensible or very poorly written”, says Shalini Sharma, a former journalist of the Financial Express, Businessworld and India Today, and currently senior consultant and head of the higher education cell of the Delhi-based Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

According to Sharma, although India Inc, which bears the brunt of reportedly the highest employee training costs worldwide, is aware of the need for deep industry-academia connect, the speed of this engagement is slow because of a leadership deficit in the academy. “Most government college and university directors and vice chancellors are promoted academics, neither trained nor equipped to become institutional leaders. The country’s new-genre private universities tend to be headed by better leaders and these institutions usually have governing boards with proven industry leaders. They are also investing heavily in excellent faculty which is more ready and willing to engage with industry. I have no doubt that within the next few decades they will outshine government-run institutions in research and innovation”, says Sharma.

However Bangalore-based HRD consultant Hema Ravichandar believes that cooperation and engagement between blue-chip companies and top-ranked higher education institutions such as the IITs, IIMs and the best universities is already quite a well-established phenomenon. According to her, blue-chip IT companies including Infosys, TCS, Wipro, Cognizant among others, have established hardware supply and maintenance, teaching and curriculum development relationships with the IITs and premier engineering colleges such as the Coimbatore-based PSG Group, PESIT and RVCE, Bangalore since the dawn of the new millennium.

“For instance, Infosys Technologies has established deep connect with a large number of engineering colleges in tier-I and tier-II cities under which the company offers pre-placement internships, curriculum development aid and advice, visiting faculty and soft skills training to faculty and students. Moreover several progressive engineering and technology companies including Siemens, Tata Motors and Tata Steel have developed high-quality apprenticeship programmes for shop-floor employees. And the Bosch Vocational Training Centre in Bangalore has been providing excellent vocational education and apprentice programmes for school-leavers for several decades. Industry-academia collaboration and cooperation is not an unknown phenomenon in India; it’s not well publicised and hasn’t spread to smaller cities and towns and medium and small-scale enterprises. Local chambers of industry and business should make this happen for the mutual benefit of MSME (medium and small-scale enterprises) and academia”, says Ravichandar, an alumna of Madras University and IIM-Ahmedabad who served as global head of human resources at Infosys Technologies for ten years, and since 2005 is an HR consultant based in Bangalore.

Quite clearly, despite the reassuring noises made by the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre about revival of the growth momentum of the Indian economy in the near future, as evidenced by the phenomenon of highly-qualified university postgraduates applying for class IV government jobs (see box p.62), the economy is on the edge of a major crisis. On the one hand, the biggest complaint of captains of India Inc is the acute shortage of adequately trained managers and skilled employees.

On the other, the country is awash with highly-qualified graduates clutching worthless certificates and paper degrees, clinching evidence of a gross misalignment of India Inc and Indian academia.

In the circumstances, it’s a national imperative that the best minds of industry and academia apply themselves to bridge the huge – and perhaps widening – gap between industry and the academy. With the tide of unemployment rising to unprecedented heights, in the absence of mutually beneficial engagement between uncompetitive Indian industry and the rapidly obsolescing academy, the country stares at social chaos and economic disaster.