India's educational system fails to provide skills needed for employability

India has moved up on a global index of talent competitiveness to the 81st position from 92nd last year. The index, released by Adecco, Insead and Tata Communications on the first day of the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, measures how countries grow, attract and retain talent. The good news, however, ends here, as India’s ranking was the worst among the five BRICS countries in 2017. China has moved up to 43rd; Russia to 53rd, South Africa to 63rd and Brazil to 73rd position.

One of the main components of the index is diversity, which is required for undertaking complex tasks that require creativity. Views of diversity have evolved significantly during the last few decades, says Paul Evans, co-editor of the report, as countries have learned that there is a difference between singing in unison (uniformity) and singing in harmony (diversity), and that this difference can be measured in terms of efficiency, competitiveness, and innovation. Formal education (from kindergarten to tertiary education) has a crucial responsibility in building the collaborative competences needed for a more inclusive world.

Countries that realise the importance of leveraging diversity as a resource and do so effectively have obviously led this year’s index. For example, Switzerland, which tops the index yet again, retains the talent it grows and is also welcoming to outside talent. Almost a quarter of Switzerland’s population was born abroad, though the country still has issues regarding gender diversity.

Among the middle-income group countries, Malaysia has done well (ranked 27) as the country makes hiring workers very easy and is effective in matching skills learned in secondary education with jobs.

The index also looks at the brain drain issue — how countries are able to retain its best people. India fares poorly on that, too. The report says where the country has plenty of room for improvement is in minimising brain drain while achieving a brain gain by luring back some of its talented diaspora members (it ranks 98th in the ‘Attract’ pillar) and in retaining its own talent (99th in ‘Retain’) — particularly in the context of high emigration rates of high-skilled people.

The reason is obvious: Seen in the context of the purchasing power parity, average wages for a person in the US is more than six times of his Indian counterpart in the academia, more than three times in management and more than double in the IT sector. It’s not a surprise therefore that India is unable to attract talent from abroad as is evident from India showing one of the worst scores on this count. 

Most importantly, all the top ranked nations have one common feature: they all have a well-developed educational system providing the social and collaboration skills needed for employability in today’s labour market. 

This is where India has faltered big time. As the ASER 2017 report showed, a large number of children in the age group 14 to 18 years in rural India drop out of school every year. On a rough calculation, therefore, nearly 1.7 million children drop out of school every year.

The big problem is that even those who stay back in school are not learning basic foundational skills. Barely literate or numerate, they are not enrolled in skill development courses and are unemployable except in low-skill jobs, and fated to depend on farm employment and other casual, manual labour.

The government itself has indicated that of the 1.76 million people trained under the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana, its flagship skilling programme, till April 2016, only 560,000 people could be certified as having successfully completed the training and only 82,000 were actually placed in jobs. But even those who get jobs see their skills getting outdated very soon as India doesn’t have something that most developed nations have — a system in place to ensure that electricians, plumbers, agricultural machine operators and other skilled trade workers update their skills regularly through an institutionalised licensing mechanism.

Gender gap is another issue. Once the eight years of elementary schooling are completed, girls begin to abandon schooling in far greater numbers than do boys; by age 18, there are 4.3 per cent more girls than boys who are not enrolled in the formal education system.

Unless these issues get on the country’s priority list, India has little hope of climbing higher on the global index of talent competitiveness.