Arvind Singhal: Educating for India's future

MARKETMIND

The last week has been marked by waves of nostalgia for me. The trigger was a visit to the University of Roorkee (now the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, Uttaranchal), from where I had the privilege of graduating as an engineer 25 years ago.

To mark our jubilee year of passing out, over 100 (out of about 260) of us from the graduating class of 1979 had reassembled to meet again. As expected, most of this graduating class has done very well in life, achieving success in a very wide assortment of industries and careers both in India as well as abroad.

However, during one of the interactive sessions, a senior administrator of this Asia's oldest technical institution, while expostulating on the recent achievements of the institute, surprised me when he very proudly mentioned that over 150 graduating engineers (out of the current class size of about 500) have been taken by just two leading IT companies operating out of Bangalore.

A bigger surprise was that practically none of these 150 was actually from the electronics and communication engineering disciplines but from other apparently "slow-moving" disciplines such as civil and metallurgical engineering and even architecture!

Hence, while the institute's management took pride in achieving almost 100 per cent success in placements, I could not help but wonder whether the remarkable success of India's IT sector and thereby its voracious appetite for hiring is inadvertently sowing the seeds of a bigger problem for India's future wherein the country's brightest engineers and MBAs will end up working in just one sector, and in practically one discipline (coding/software implementation) rather than manning research and development, product engineering, and product management activities in a host of other equally important sectors.

The trend could become worse in the years to come, with the top 10 Indian and international IT companies requiring to hire tens of thousands of bright young professionals, and in the process, end up taking them from leading engineering and management campuses from India without really wondering if many of those engineers are really needed for the jobs that can be managed equally well by non-engineer, vocationally trained graduates.

It is no great revelation today that intellectual capital is probably the biggest potential strength India can leverage in the years to come. A brilliant article in the Harvard Business Review (October 2004) eloquently describes the emergence of a new class of workers (beyond the usual blue- and white-collar definitions) termed as the "creative class".

In a knowledge- and services-driven economy, this creative class has at its core "the scientists, engineers, architects, designers, educators, artists, musicians, and entertainers whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology, or new content."

The article goes on to add that in the same creative class of workers, also included are "the creative professionals of business and finance, law, healthcare, and related fields, in which the knowledge workers engage in complex problem solving that involves a great deal of independent judgment". The article, of course, goes on to describe the creativity""national competitiveness connection.

In this context, it is crucial not only for the government of India and the ministry of human resource development but also all the stakeholders in India's economic and competitive growth to think hard and think creatively on the very fundamental changes that are taking place in the world around us, leading to the development of white papers on identifying the quantum of creative class workers needed by India and the rest of the world in the coming decades, and then putting together a public""private partnership model in place to develop/upgrade educational and training facilities within the country so that India can become the fountainhead for the supply of tens of millions of young creative class practitioners.

Chambers of commerce such as the CII, FICCI and others can provide very valuable input (through their members that span all sectors of industrial and commercial activity) on the current and emerging national and global intellectual capital needs and then work very closely not only with the government (both at the central and state levels) but even directly with the administrators of leading educational institutions in India to see how these needs can best be met.

Like in the world of consumer goods and services, it is critical to keep a very close control on the quality of output, and hence various institutions involved in accreditation and education quality control have to be suitably upgraded so that India produces top-quality talent across the board.

Like in countries such as the US, the role of education delivery and education management has to be very clearly understood and segregated. Unfortunately, in most of the leading (public) institutions of higher education, high-calibre educationalists are also the directors and vice-chancellors and deans of these facilities.

It is, therefore, no surprise that in many instances, there is a big gap between what India needs in terms of the skill sets and what these institutions are geared to produce.

Like in the world where competition for goods and services is now global and not local, benchmarking for the quality of our creative class professionals has to be on a global level and not just confined to intra-IIT or IIM levels only.

Like in the real world of consumer goods and services, good packaging is essential but at the core, it is the intrinsic quality (at the right value) that determines the success or failure.

Hence, benchmarking for the ranking of such institutions should not be based only on physical infrastructure or placement/salary record but more on the quality and quantity of research/innovative/creative idea output! Only then can we educate for the future of India rather than for the growth of a few select companies in select few sectors!

arvind@ksa-technopak.com