(This was my first post in LinkedIn)
India will have 900 million strong workforce in another 15 years. In comparison USA has just 160 million currently. It should be our effort to skill them sufficiently to face the challenges that lie ahead. Average earnings of an Indian per year currently is around $1500 in comparison with above $36000 in the US. Our challenge is to raise incomes while reducing inequality.
India will have 900 million strong workforce in another 15 years. In comparison USA has just 160 million currently. It should be our effort to skill them sufficiently to face the challenges that lie ahead. Average earnings of an Indian per year currently is around $1500 in comparison with above $36000 in the US. Our challenge is to raise incomes while reducing inequality.
In just one year India sends a hundred thousand students to the US
for higher studies. Taken together across countries they cost more than
$20 billion in foreign exchange. If we raise Indian Education Standards,
we can save a lot of that money. There was a hundred percent increase
in African student population in our country in the year gone by. Our
PM, Narendra Modi himself said that we can export teachers who can wipe
out illiteracy from the world. Infosys Chairman Emeritus, N. R Narayana
Murthy has often said that in order to succeed as an economy we should
send the brightest 50 thousand students from our colleges overseas for
higher studies at full scholarship with the condition that they return
back and work here.
Overseas Indians send about $70 billion as remittances. It helps
but is small change compared with $60 billion black money going out
every year. We spend more than $40 billion, entirely unnecessarily, in
importing gold every year. We spend around $150-250 billion on petroleum
imports and $60-80 billion worth electronic goods imports. By 2020
electronic goods imports are expected to rise to $250-300 billion if
nothing is done to promote local production.
Indian Industry was struggling to compete with global peers because
of government apathy and wrong policies. The drubbing that India as a
nation is taking was entirely avoidable. Things should change for the
better in due course. Happiness Index of Indians has taken a beating in
the past five years. Percentage of Malnourished people increased by 2
percent in the period. Per capita consumption of calories has shown a
secular decrease since a few decades.
American farmers numbering about 33 million are the second largest
food grain producers in the world behind Chinese, while more than 550
million people dependent on farming in India produce lesser than half of
American output. How do we shift farmers to the services and Industry?
High earning jobs are relatively harder to come by. Skilling them right
should be the goal and onus is on the Education Sector to take this
burden on itself. NSDC(National Skill Development Corporation) Udaan has
lined up government sponsored education for the unemployed. Education
is a sector where Private-Public Partnership can be forged.
This government has a clear agenda of reforms and their goal of
having at-least 20 Indian universities in the top 100 of universities
the world seems daunting at first sight. Only eight Indian Universities
are currently within the top 800 with the first one between 250-300. It
is heartening to see Indian research output rising to its level of 3.1%
of the world output, a level that was reached about three decades back,
after which we faltered.
The overhaul of education should happen both within government and
private institutions and tenure of professors should be linked to
research output. Even government school teachers need to be made more
efficient and regular in their work. This requires linking pay with
performance.
