Dr. D. Mukhopadhyay
All of us may agree that unemployment problem of India is a socio-economic problem . Indian job market demand consists of requirement of trained and qualified personnel for private sector and government sector by and large. Again in major portion of private sector, job market is dominated by unorganized sector job market. For both private and government sector job market, there is specified qualification and experience for a particular position where as for unorganized sector job market, skilled , semi skilled and unskilled personnel are employed for which there is no specified qualification and experience. It goes without saying that the amount consisting of compensation package and other fringe benefits depend upon qualifications, experience and of course the standard and practice of a specified industry belonging to organized sector.
Compensation package for the personnel working in unorganized sector remains more or less variable and it is fixed more or less unilaterally by the employer. But if we look at the organized sector, we can perceive that there is constant demand for professionally qualified and trained personnel and hardly any dearth of employment for those kind of jobseekers. Professionally qualified personnel include the population specially trained in a particular discipline and considered to be expert in the respective fields and here professions include Medicine, Engineering & Technology, Accountancy(both Chartered Accountancy and Cost & Management Accountancy), Corporate Secretarial, Management , Law etc. The objective of each of these courses are to produce highly specialized and trained professionals in the respective domain and discipline. Society is not much worried about them since they act as employment creators besides making provision for economic engagement for themselves. All the economically advanced countries across the globe are driven by professionals since they are readily available for solving the socio-economic problems and addressing the issues in befitting manner. India is a vast country and her requirement is also diverse and there is hardly any substance for debate on the same.
Milton Firedman, Nobel Laureate, advocates that business of business is to make profit. Sales is the only window through which revenue enter into business and it is the product or service that earns profit after absorbing the cost of production and distribution and the same cannot be burdened with cost of unserviceable graduates who cannot contribute directly or indirectly in the production and distribution system. For instances, graduates from pure arts and humanities discipline have limited scope in corporate sector. But they are also necessary in the field of knowledge creation and knowledge dissemination. Thus, Professional Education are employment oriented and more or less it guarantees for job and demand for professionals is more than supply and that is why a professional can bargain in the job market but the scope for bargaining is limited for the non professionally qualified people. Moreover, supply of the non professionally qualified people is more than demand and consequently , price in the labour market is determined unilaterally by the employer and it is obviously low and there is scope for exploitation too. Banks, Insurance, telecommunication, heavy engineering, information technology, advertisement and publicity , railway, department of post and governments’ secretariats needs trained man power because they need readymade solution to a problem. Majority of Indian Universities run certain courses without any student nor any infrastructure and faculty are serviced with the money from exchequers that is in turn again nothing but tax paid by people of India.
Therefore, time has come to ponder over the issues raised in this write up. India cannot afford to produce unemployable graduates anymore. She has to make her education delivery mechanism more pragmatic and result driven. Government of India should frame a policy for more and more professional educational institutions and should ask the Universities to develop courses on the basis of USP(Unique Selling Proposition) of each course and other courses having no direct link with production and distribution system in particular and corporate and industrial sector in general should be limited in quantity. Government of India should make budgeted allocation more for the profession oriented courses. Economic advancement may not be possible unless we can have the base of professional education. Many may argue that, traditional courses may be given importance too besides the professional courses. The answer to such question is obviously yes but when there is resource crunch, it is to be rationed and allocation should be made judiciously. Since Independence, India has progressed in many folds in different sectors but many are left to done . Moreover, our Universities are not linked with the endowment and or policy thereof for corporate India and we are lagging behind with respect to that culture as compared with that of economically advanced countries and say the case of USA whose education delivery system is based on the foundation of endowment of private corporates and all the reputed Universities are Private Universities. Endowments come for traditional courses of the Universities but more come for the Professional Courses. India’s education policy has to keep pace with changes in technology and the job market.
Education should be such which can trade off between demand and supply in the job market. Political agenda of the government should be away from the governance of education sector. When country’s education shall be profession oriented, then the churned out professionals shall be providing job to others through startups and entrepreneurial ventures . This is a model that is time tested in economically developed countries like Japan, USA, UK etc.
The largest economy in the world is USA followed by China according to the recent report of the World Bank known as International Comparison Program and third largest economy is India. The reason to find out for economic advancement and progress of both USA and China is not far to seek and it can safely be argued that the key to success of those two giant economy is nothing but professionalization of education delivery system which they took as a project many many years ago and now they are reaping the fruits from such effort. The USA accounts for 17% of the world’s GDP, China accounts for 15% when India accounts for 6.4% of world GDP though she is in third place. Difference between 15 and 6.4 and 17 and 6.4 is quite and considerably high. Thus India has to be very judicious and careful while formulating her economic strategy. Job market in India is of shrinking trends particularly in traditional domain and therefore job shall be available to those who used to work under the environment of automation and technology savvy of course.
India needs more Engineers, Accountants, Doctors, Management Graduates, Legal Professionals and there is spontaneous demand for them in the job market and secretarial service required by these people shall be based on automation and thus less skilled people shall be made redundant in the corporate and industrial sectors. Before, we conclude, it is worth mentioning that education should be based on quality and not quantity. In order to make considerable economic progress and advancement of the society, India is to make a tradeoff between Professional Education Vs General Education in no time and go for the such which would take her economic status to the zenith. Professional Education orientation is a must in order to make rapid economic progress and then other sides of education should be given necessary attention too.
(The author is Professor of Management at School of Business, Faculty of Management, Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, Katra).
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