It is high time to ask some tough questions?
Scarcity of talents in India? Yes, it looks like that! Why the Indian talents are missing in the current ruling dispensation? Whom to blame? Which sector is failing us? Education? Very likely!
Yes, if you look around and search for the culprit education is certainly the one big villain and of course, there are many others, we can point out many others, the leadership. a range of. Fields from politics to economics and why, even the many other fields. The trigger for this piece is the recent news. That NITI Aayog, the renamed old Planning Commission is now getting a new incumbent, an old had in economic research with many faced talents. The newly conceived reincarnation of the old Planning Commission, after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Was to have a new market-driven economic growth model etc.
The crucial point here is whatever the explanation for creating new economic planning, the device has to be through a set of experts and great thinkers and also a sort of many visions and visionaries for foreseeing the future.
In the last ten years or so many new talents, I mean, in particular, many talented economists had been brought back from the US academics, chiefly economic professors. To help formulate guidelines to create a mechanism that would do a better job than what existed before.
The old Planning Commission, for as long as it existed had, if we can say so, certain glamour and I would even say certain credibility. Names like P.C. Mahalanobis, K.N. Raj, and many others whose reputation still survives.
After the new institution was created we didn’t have that sort of glamour and creativity, right?
Why we are not able to draw the best, internationally-reputed names, there are so many, why even the Nobel winners in many disciplines can be best utilised for building a new India. Yes, I firmly think so and my conviction remains the same and my conviction is reinforced by the very fact, the three and more reputed economists who came to serve the Indian government, at the NITI AYOG didn’t complete their tenure, why even the economic advisers to the government couldn’t complete their terms/. They went back to the USA and they couldn’t, I dare say, survive in the current environment. Of course, these are very sensitive and embarrassing. To ask. No one in Delhi would dare to ask such sensitive questions for obvious reasons anyway, this is one minor observation to say why Indian talents have been missing in the current ruling dispensation.
Of course, this is not an easy question to answer quickly and India, especially more so the Delhi environment is filled with retired government servants but no independent thinking public intellectuals?
Of course, there are still more such questions. There is this other question, there are so many reputed management experts even at such reputed institutions like the Harvard Business School. The head of the faculty there is, I guess an Indian name of great reputation. The question here is doesn’t it sound odd that we, Indian talent is sought after to teach the Americans and others to succeed in business management while in India itself we see Indians are creating many unicorns, billionaires by many entrants who are modestly educated, some with no education itself, yet Indian talents are sought in the USA to teach their countrymen to learn from Indians! Doesn’t that really sound odd?
As I look at this ticklish question I want to draw attention to what is really happening in the education sector?
India has been thoroughly Corrupted, it now means only the tuition industry in which new billionaires have come to dominate. Education is perhaps the most talked-about sector and also the most unspoilt area of national pursuit.
Open the daily newspaper page. Almost every day the frontages are filled with. Advertisements calling for candidates for IAS coaching academies, promising the moon!
How many more education reform reports do we need before we start implementing any resorts at all? What ails Indian education?
Yes, some steps have been taken to create new universities and new high education courses. But they are unlikely to address the issues. Indian education has expanded fast and diverse schools, curriculums and education fashions. Come along.
The private English medium schools are thriving. So too is the exploitation of the helpless lower classes of people. Hence the many state governments have come out with diverse and often contradictory school systems. Take Tamil Nadu where there is this NEET conundrum. The state government wants the NEET to be abolished, The Apex court has opposed it. What the Central government can do?
Then the mother tongue question. In the meantime. The thrust for English medium education is faster.
The ground-level reality is that. The private sector education, bother at the bottom level and at the top level, for such courses as engineering and medicine become a gold mine for the new generation of education entrepreneurs. Who is becoming a big social force in every state?
This new social class wields lot of clout in politics too and this is a vast new subject that impacts politics in so many ways. One more critical issue I want to touch upon for the education policymakers at the top Delhi levels is the phenomenon of the education migration of the younger Indian generation to the Western shores. Every year lakhs, exact data are available, of Indian students travel, like we saw in the case of Ukraine war, the Indian students for instance in the UK and USA pay in lakhs and crore to get a foreign degree.
Most of them don’t come back!
Is this all about Indian education’s a great many goals? Have anyone, big guns, ask any questions?
There used to be a few foreign scholarships like the Rhodes. Whose awarding was influenced by a select few in Delhi.Has any big thing been done by any anyone Rhodes scholar?
Please name one! So, this game of living in a dream world of favouring a few at the top is going on for years. This year. We have seen the cut-off marks. Confusion. Can the school leavers every one of them go on getting century marks?
We have to do something radical to reverse the talents outflow. We have to recruit foreigners. Talent in Indian faculty and management reverses the foreign outflow of talents and resources so that we learn to create and retain Indian talents.
Of course, Indian talents itself is a complex subject and issue that needs separate and many discussions.
Image Source : reclamationmagazine.com