In this country of alarming statistics - the highest number of malnourished children under the age of five, the need to create employment for an additional 51 million job seekers by the end of this decade, according to Crisil - one that seems to have received less publicity than it deserves is the skill deficit the country faces. By 2022, there is likely to be a gap of 100 million skilled labourers in infrastructure and 13 million in healthcare.
For a new government, in addition to bringing relations with Pakistan on to an even keel, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already made an excellent start, nothing should be more important than jobs, education and skills. Madhu Kishwar and Ajay Maken's mean-spirited criticism of Smriti Irani's lack of educational qualifications to be head of the human resources development (HRD) ministry misses the point. Akbar, who was illiterate, was India's greatest ruler in medieval times. Having a charismatic young woman who has not gone to college could mean she has more empathy for the principal problems at hand. The high dropout rates in India's secondary schools as well as the poor learning outcomes that mean that most children in class five cannot do basic arithmetic are just two, while the fact that only 40 per cent of Indian women between the age of 25 and 54 work outside their homes, compared with almost 90 per cent in China, is a third.
Regardless of whether you are a demographic dividend/disaster optimist/pessimist, these paradoxical rallying cries by now ought to have elevated the human resources development ministry to arguably the most important ministerial appointment there is to make. Sadly, going all the way back to the founding of the ministry in 1985, the person who had the job of minister usually had it for the wrong reasons - either that they were an afterthought or that they were being shunted to a "minor" ministry to cut them down to size. Rajiv Gandhi's appointment of P V Narasimha Rao as HRD minister in 1985 and Rao's of Arjun Singh in 1991 are examples. Rahul Gandhi had the superb idea of bringing in Nandan Nilekani as HRD minister in 2009, but this was derailed by others in the Congress high command.
It would be better to have put a technocrat in charge of a restyled ministry of jobs and skills. The super-ministry would have benefitted from the experience of S Ramadorai, who chairs the National Skill Development Agency and formerly of Tata Consultancy Services, or Manish Sabharwal, chairman of TeamLease Services, who regularly has something provocative to say about this "job emergency". This is a useful talent in the Age of Arnab.
Five years ago, the government estimated that India needed to skill or re-skill 500 million Indians by 2022. One need only watch many of our construction workers or plumbers at work to realise this might be an underestimate. We need to take an axe to India's apprenticeship laws. Mr Sabharwal reports that in the midst of an argument with a senior member of the previous government who asked him to be more patient about government inaction on the Apprenticeship Act, he felt compelled to point out that fixing apprenticeships was on Indira Gandhi's 20-point programme, circa 1975. In a recent interview with Business Standard, he said that, as a result, India only has 300,000 apprentices, while Germany has three million, Japan 10 million and China 20 million.
This lack of urgency is characteristic of Lutyens' Delhi, but in tackling our jobs challenge, the tardiness is paving the way to demographic disaster. Recasting outmoded labour laws has been on the government's to-do list since 1991. In the absence of such reforms, in the past couple of years as China has seen factory wages rise at close to 20 per cent a year, Vietnam and Bangladesh have been the major beneficiaries of the shift of labour-intensive jobs to less expensive locations. Ranjan Mahtani, the CEO of garment manufacturer Epic in Hong Kong, which employs almost 30,000 workers in Bangladesh and Vietnam, told me this week that a large US customer was urging suppliers to consider Ethiopia and Kenya as costs rise in China.
Our companies also deserve a large share of the blame. Their argument that they are unwilling to train factory workers because these employees might be poached and therefore that they require government assistance is self-serving, but also a function of most of them being small companies. A recent World Bank paper found that Indian companies were at the very bottom in terms of on-the-job training while Chinese companies, notably the country's export-oriented and multinational employers with more than 150 workers, were at the top.
Instead, what this country is very good at creating is low-skilled, if somewhat pointless, service sector jobs - car washers because drivers will not wash cars; two, sometimes three, employees manning toll booths; and countless rail carriage sweepers hoping for a tip. In China, on the other hand, the conductor cleans up after checking tickets. The informal sector, Mr Sabharwal points out, not only handicaps our efforts to raise labour productivity, but is the 21st century equivalent of slavery.
Twitter: @RahulJJacob
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