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 not with standing. 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.
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)
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