What was striking about the agitation was the presence of many educated young people complaining about being unable to find work. This points to the urgent need to connect education to employment in India.
As reported in the Wall Street Journal, 75 per cent of technical graduates and over 85 per cent of general graduates do not satisfy the employment criteria for India’s high-growth industries. The education and training system in its current form is not connecting degree-holders with hands-on knowledge. There is no framework or mechanism at either the state or federal level to support education institutions to encourage innovative approaches to education that emphasise flexibility in program design, development and delivery.
The demand for reservations of government jobs is directly proportional to the sense of insecurity the youth of contemporary India are subjected to. This is fundamentally due to the failure of the education system to infuse quality, creativity, innovation and imagination. The fear that educated youth will be unable to secure lasting employment is a result of the inadequacies of the prevailing education system.
Government jobs are seen as a safe haven from this insecurity as they are perceived to have lower performance standards. In the private sector, youth who meet the entry criteria and land a job often ultimately fail to retain it. In my own experience running four separate social enterprises, it is uncommon for the retention rate for new graduates to exceed 25 per cent.
There is no one answer to address the challenge, especially when India is set to be the most populous country in the world. One approach would be to make education a combination of traditional, applied and action-based learning by infusing hands-on knowledge, experience-based learning and practice-oriented pedagogy.
Centurion University, which I run, operates on such a model. Centurion University emphasises inclusive education — that is, educational strategies that are suitable for varying learning styles and needs. It focuses on providing practical skills development and a hands-on approach to help students develop sustainable livelihoods. This includes fostering the values of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. This approach can be particularly useful for students from socio-economically marginalised groups that may not have as much opportunity to attain higher qualifications. India should develop institutional mechanisms to support education providers to embrace similar innovations in content design and delivery.
Recent government policies — such as ‘Start Up India’, ‘Make in India’ and ‘Digital India’ — must be an integral part of the education system. Universities should be built up as hubs of activity for all of these policies through seed funds provided by the Indian government. There must be policy incentives for universities to create a platform to provide inclusive, integrated and holistic education.
Building future citizens of a country is the primary responsibility of any government. In the Indian context, developing human capital is an imperative owing to the population size, language and cultural diversity, and its potential to bring about an Indian economic resurgence. Institutes of learning across the globe, and especially in India, must be responsible for making education relevant, appropriate and meaningful to boost graduates employment opportunities.
To this end, universities should create common facility centres as part of youth education and training to encourage young people to become entrepreneurs. Common facility centres would create basic infrastructure that could be used to help local students and entrepreneurs develop their skills and professional networks. Centurion University runs one such centre called the Urban Micro Business Centre in Bhubaneswar. The centre provides training as well as a common facility, stocked with appropriate equipment, to enable skilled personnel to manufacture goods.
Such efforts by universities will act as an interlocutor to address the challenge of nurturing entrepreneurial skill and creating community leaders. Currently, university degrees have no proportional relevance to graduates’ job opportunities or practical knowledge. It is imperative that universities provide graduates with practical skills that can be quantified and replicated. This will address the underlying frustration among unemployed graduates that has manifested in the violent Jat agitation.
Reservations cannot be discarded in their entirety, but India needs to move beyond such solutions to address the underlying causes of youth unemployment. Affirmative action and sponsored mobility for disadvantaged groups must be robust. But even more importantly, India must develop a practical and innovative high education system, lest it lose its relevance as a knowledge economy.
Professor Mukti Mishra is the Founder of Centurion University of Technology and Management.
Very relevant and well written too. Gives a possible direction for a sustainable way forward. Policies need to change with context – in the case of reservations and everything else. The problem is one with a policies like reservation, state participation in enterprise, labour laws, jurisprudence, subsidies etc – but their continuation much sell by dates.
How do we institutionalise, across organisations and management levels, a continuous feedback loop to review and revamp policies/laws. That is the moot point.
Policy makers are busy in creating vote banks/hman traps to attract hoards of greedy individuals who lack a sense of responsibility.
Now, it is time to act. We have to be part of policy making may be from inside or out side. But better to be from inside by entering into politics directly.
Its the same problem that the USA especially if you are a student in a poor ghetto area or in a poor rural area regard that the schools have the same educational standards and classes that you find an affluent neighborhood. We don’t emphasize blue collar jobs even though they require high math and science skills especially with the new jobs of the future. I also agree with Kartik Chandra Mishra regarding our politicians who only care about taking money from their corporate donors, sending jobs overseas, importing foreign workers, and not investing in America.
Industry oriented education should be implemented by which retention can be reduced as India will be most populous country of the age group between 18 to 26
Incentives for intstitutes of higher education that nurture practical and hands on learning connected directly to sustainable employability is the need of the hour in India. Hope the policy makers will take note of this than following the age old constituency based appeasing methods.
Very well written sir.
The Indian Caste based reservation system and the arguments related to it have been the subject of electoral promises, books, national debates, forum discussions and bar fights. Since the past (or finding whom to blame) is the primary focus, these exercises hardly result in anything productive. So, instead of talking or discussing about all these things I personally believe that there should be equal opportunity for all.
The Caste based reservation system is a inconclusive debate with no clear cut lines. There is little evidence that it has made a difference to the poor over the forty years of practicing it, but the system cannot be scrapped or changed easily as the social disadvantages remain a contentious issue. What I feel is there are no authoritative answers to this one.
Now a days, India has taken much more strategies for skill development.But when we look in the other side, that our country based on agriculture. so in this regard, neither Government nor from any other private institutions are taking initiatives for up grading the indigenous/traditional skills of the farmers, which is gradually grind down in farmers practice in the agriculture sector.
I found that as a relevant and timely article.
It could be serialised and in the next, our role with respect to a more burning issue like the Naxalite movement ( Compared toThe Jat and Patels agitation ) could be highlighted.
The opinion ” There must be policy incentives for universities to create a platform to provide inclusive, integrated and holistic education.” could be made more elaborative.
For example: Could we dream of replacing the subsidy on rice, with subsidy on training, so as to make a BPL citizen earn his rice and convert himself to APL !!
Everyone should aware about vocational training.We cannot disagree that theoretical knowledge does not help us but practically if we can’t use ,it is totally useless.Centurion university doesn’t only gives certificate to get an interview call but also it makes student capable to perform the best in the industry.
The trend of education has changed. It is now days the skill that recognize you into every field entry through; The skill integration is helping the new generation to get hand on skilled and know of action oriented learning, and opportunities in various new sectors.
The adaptation of skill is growing gradually and hope this charge citizens,bureaucrats to follow, accept, acknowledge and implement skill education.
Recent government policies like Skill India, Make in India etc are the integral part of education and it is us to implement it.
I recently had the good fortune of reading your article ‘Reforming India’s University Sector’.It was well written and contained sound, practical advice. Thank you for your thorough research & clear writing.
While much has been written on this topic,your article expresses both the positive & negative aspects of this important topic.
I fully support the call given by Prof. Mukti Mishra to Union and State Government and government agencies to facilitate Universities like Centurion University (CUTM); Universities which are innovating in educational programs, curricula, pedagogy and the like to integrate skill, practice and application of curricular knowledge into the education imparted to the youth of the country.
Presently, the governmental support to universities and educational institutions is heavily biased against the self-financed universities like CUTM. It is an extremely difficult task for such a university to obtain approval for projects from government agencies. Whereas, it is a lot easier for government-run universities to land plum projects supported by government agencies.
Under its flag-ship programs like “Start-up India”, “Make in India” and the like, Government should create new quantitative criteria for ensuring level playing field for all Universities, government-run and self-financed, evaluate their delivery index and link its support mechanisms (projects and schemes) to this performance index of all universities…
Sir your opnion is quite interesting and well writen.‘Start Up India’, ‘Make in India’ and ‘Digital India’ -this three are the part of education and we should implement in our skill intigration.I think we go through the adult learning principal and we change our trend pattern ,this will help to grow our skill intigration.
Thanks for such a useful post.Now a days students need to be skilled in order to get employment.It is very much important to get skills and only then we can think of a bright future of a country.
We usually face this problems that a person is knowledgeable but not skilled enough to do a particular job.
“We usually face this problem that a person is knowledgeable but not skilled enough to do a particular job.”
You look at American CEOs. They have academic degrees in finance, marketing, business, economics but when it comes to technical skills, they don’t know anything or how things work. I look at Digital India and Made in India, and I am impressed by how the government is helping out in the various sectors compare to the USA where you have American CEOs and millionaries deciding what is best for the country.
Education is irrelevant unless it gives economic independence, which in turn protects and builds the dignity of an individual. Integrating skill into higher education enhances not only the employability, but also self-esteem and confidence of the person well enough to have the courage and conviction to start his/ her own micro-enterprise if preferred jobs are not available.
Nicely written on a very current topic. He has rightly pointed out the issues in educational sector in India and has provided strategies to address those. Centurion University under his leadership is doing a great job not only providing quality education, but also making students employable and industry ready.
So relevant & well written .There are several reasons for unemployment in India. But the most important I see, is the lack of mentoring for youth; the lack of grooming them to be employable. Another one is agriculture. Employment in agriculture is falling; educated youth hate it because it has no future prospect. Everyone wants to join the corporate world but it cannot provide opportunities for all. So everyone should focus on practical issues; enhance their skill through government skill training courses, to meet the criteria for employment. Everyone says that India is in the developing stage but the fact is that jobless growth can’t be called development.
Education is immaterial unless it gives economic independence.
Adaptation and integrating of skill into higher education is growing gradually which enhances employability as well as economic independence.