One of the great conundrums of post-independence India’s national development effort is why for over six decades and counting, successive governments at the Centre and in the states have grossly neglected early childhood, primary, secondary and higher education right across the spectrum. Surely it’s always been self-evident that unless we have a well-educated population, the country will never develop into a healthy democracy or economy. True, Nehruvian India took a Soviet-inspired wrong turn which required massive deployment of resources into public sector heavy industry, starving the social sectors. But for all their faults which resulted in the global collapse of communism in 1989, neither the erstwhile Soviet Union nor communist China neglected education. Both these countries are almost wholly literate, while one-third of India’s population is illiterate and another 50 percent just about so. Could there be some substance in the charge made by India’s communist parties that the middle class establishment which rules the country, has deliberately neglected public education to retain the masses in ignorance and poverty to ensure ready availability of a huge pool of cheap labour?
Regrettably, the original sin of neglecting school and higher education has been compounded by ignorance about the socio-economic value of vocational and skills education. Whereas China has 500,000 VET (vocational education and training) centres countrywide, India has 11,250. And while 60-80 percent of workers in all forms of employment in the industrial OECD countries have received formal VET education, in India barely 2 percent have. The upshot of neglect of VET is that the output and total factor productivity per factory worker in India is half of China’s, and perhaps one-tenth of German and European labour.
Fortunately even if belatedly, perhaps spooked by the phenomenon of severe shortages of skilled workers in the midst of rising youth unemployment — the country needs to create 12 million new jobs per year — the Delhi establishment has finally awoken to the need to disseminate VET on a massive scale to make the country’s youth employable. In 2009, it promoted the National Skill Development Corporation, a public-private partnership to fund VET education providers countrywide. But while NSDC is making steady progress in its national mission, a more exciting and high-potential development is the rising number of technology professionals, trusts and philanthropists who have stepped forward to empower and enable India’s national skilling mission. In our cover story, we profile five promising NGOs which are scaling and racing to skill India’s short-changed children and youth. May their tribe increase.
And with polling in the 16th General Election about to begin, in our second lead feature, managing editor Summiya Yasmeen reports that lip service and ritual promises is all that spokespersons of major political parties have to offer to education reforms and development. The communists may be right after all.
