By Aditya Aamir
Education. Lack of skills.
Jobs. Unemployment. Start thinking of these and the picture of a banana
republic emerges. How much does India allocate for education? Compared to
developed countries, hardly enough to cover the population. The US Department
of Education got discretionary funding of $70.7 billion in 2016, an increase of
4% over the previous year. Spending on education in India was 2.7% of GDP for
financial year 2018. Compared to peers, India spends the least on education.
And then we claim superpower
status. And then we complain India’s schools are awful. And then we rue that
our graduates are total misfits in the job market. And then we rail against the
lack of skills in our workforce. And then we protest against shortage of “real”
jobs. And then we play victim and the cycle of education-skill-jobs-unemployment
continues.
Governments are directly
responsible for the mess. And there are consequences. The mess is the
consequence. Come election time, shortage of jobs becomes an issue but never
education and its sorry state. This has been a constant in India’s electoral
history and education system. And ‘who cares?’ has been attitude of successive
governments. The few times the education system has become an election issue
were when accidently a clampdown was ordered on cheating/copying in examinations.
In the old days, ‘shameful
conduct’ used to be the lot of scattered students in all schools and the boy,
whose conduct was termed ‘shameful’, had a difficult time getting the conduct
certified by parent. Those days are long gone. Today, teachers lack the
education to teach, their Bachelors and Masters in Education notwithstanding.
Besides, even if competent they just do not seem to care. Yearlong they teach
half-hearted and come final exams, they facilitate mass copying.
These are the students who go
to college and college is no different from school. Only a small percent of
youth get admission to colleges that will stand to scrutiny, the rest settle
for ‘degree-shops’ from which emerge shallow intellect and no skills. Then, it
is the hunt for jobs and the majority are looking for government jobs. Doesn’t
matter what the job – Peon. Clerk. Assistant. Supervisor. Section Officer.
Thousands line up at employment centres. Parents worry; scrape money to pay for
job applications, which is revenue for governments.
India’s education assembly
line rolls out job-misfits. Tamil Nadu churns out engineers like flies multiply
in filth. Kerala rolls out graduates who end up graphic designers and odd-job
NRI in Gulf countries, living 10-12 to an AC-room, bored to stupor in the
evenings as much by lack of something to do as by the 70-80% humidity, which
leaves the body sweating just by standing still. Bihar and Uttar Pradesh,
Madhya Pradesh produce half-baked job-seekers, misfits in the job-market which
has now gone to looking for Artificial Intelligence.
The only students who succeed
in getting “solid” jobs are those with a plan, study hard with a goal in mind,
who have ‘contacts’, the means and the intelligence to study further in Indian
and foreign universities. The ones who become student leaders are those who do
well irrespective of whether they study hard or not. People like Kanhaiya Kumar
and Shehla Rashid, and Vijay Jolly and Arun Jaitley – student leaders who
graduated with Emergency.
But Emergency is 42 years
behind and lot of water has flown down the river. Several general elections,
too. And a number of Prime Ministers. Quite a few of them accidental, not just
Dr Manmohan Singh. A strict definition of ‘accidental’ will place Devegowda and
IK Gujral; Charan Singh and VP Singh, Chandrashekhar in ‘The Accidental Prime
Minister’ film. Why, even Indira Gandhi started ‘accidental’ and Rajiv Gandhi
was crowned PM because of a planned accidental assassination.
The drift is that India’s
democracy is chaos multiplied by several times because of the divisions and
additions and subtractions. What remains after all this arithmetic is confused
algebra – algorithms in social media. The cave gave us prophets. The garage
gave us the ‘PC’ and Google and Facebook. Every general election, the incumbent
gets called – for not producing jobs at the rate graduates pop up. The Prime
Minister says “sell pakodas”. HRD Minister says hard to “calculate jobs
creation.” Experts say that’s a lie. Media say ‘What the Hell?’
Nobody talks of the rut in
education, the low budgetary allocation; the laggards among the youth in rural
and small-town India. The lazing village square. Nobody talks of jobs being
there but skills for the jobs not being there. If the founders had vision, they
would have seen it coming: Unqualified India. Unskilled India.
For India growing, the
commanding heights was education. Quality education. Focused education. That
would have lifted India out of the communal and caste cauldron. Made
progressives of all of us. Given us committed and honest governments instead of
accidental prime ministers. And compromised prime ministers.(IPA Service)
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