Given the sheer size of her 480 million-plus workforce, can India be the driving force behind a global skill-based economy? An in-depth debate
(From left to right) Prof Errol D'Souza, Syna Dehnugara, Dharmendra Pradhan and Saurabh SrivastvaIndia is projected to have 962 million people in the working age group by 2030, which would then be the highest in the world. Given the potential of its current and future demographic dividend, India too has significant advantages. However, this dividend could soon turn into a liability if right skills and education are not imparted to its population. As the world faces a significant talent shortage across sectors, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also keeps stressing the need to revamp our education sector to make India’s workforce of tomorrow future-ready with right skills and an entrepreneurial spirit.
Though a lot of effort has been made under the Skill India Mission in the last four years, is it enough to face the challenges of tomorrow? Perhaps not, because currently the government spends less than 1.5 per cent of India’s GDP on the education sector, which is hugely insufficient given the scale of the task at hand. It is estimated that about 30-60 per cent of skills needed in the future do not exist within the workforce today.
So what’s the solution? How do we reimagine learning in India? How do we redesign and implement a programme that can revamp India’s largely antiquated education system?
These were some of the questions addressed by an eminent panel in one of the most intellectually-stimulating sessions of the Hero Enterprise’s Mindmine Summit 2018 held recently in New Delhi. The three stalwarts who brain stormed these issues included Dharmendra Pradhan (DDP), Union Minister of Petroleum & Natural Gas and Skill Development & Entrepreneurship; Saurabh Srivastava (SS), Co-founder, Indian Angel Network; and Prof. Errol D’Souza (ED) , Director of IIM Ahmedabad. This hour long and jam-packed session was anchored by CNBC’s well known news presenter, Syna Dehnugara.
Corporate Citizen takes you through this highly volatile discussion which critically analyzed all aspects of the Modi Government’s most-ambitious Skill Development Mission. Edited excerpts:
Syna Dehnugara: I’ve two nieces, one in Std V and another in Std X. I help them off and on with their studies. Recently, while preparing for her Computer Science (CS) test, the younger one approached me with her study material which contained some very rudimentary stuff like what is a floppy disk. I wondered why this child, who has never seen a floppy disk, had to answer such a question. I was quite alarmed so I asked the-15 year-old to share her CS textbook with me. I thought it’ll have something on Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) and such other cutting-edge technologies that we’ve in our smartphones and which deeply impact our lives. But I was disappointed and that left me thinking that not only do we need to reimagine higher education and skills, we also need to reimagine what we’re doing with our primary education and on that note, I want to ask you:
Saurabh SrivastvaSaurabh Srivastava: The first thing is, we need to reimagine in any case because two-thirds of our population is under-35 and in another ten years, we’ll have a billion working population. For us, it’s very important that it becomes an asset and not a liability. So far, we haven’t done a great job at any level—whether it’s primary, secondary or even higher education. We don’t have universities which rank among the top 100 in the world. Then there is this issue of employability. A lot of our universities are still teaching stuff that the British used, to create ‘babus.’ So, there is lack of alignment between what we’re teaching and where the jobs are available. This mismatch in itself makes us reimagine the challenge we’ve before us which is also an opportunity; more so, because 60% of jobs as we know them today will disappear in the next decade. There’ll be a new set of jobs in the market. So, there is a chance for us to reset what we’re teaching, how we’re teaching and how we’re leveraging technology because this disruption will happen not only for us but in all the countries in the world. When I was growing up, the only source of knowledge was the books that I had and what the teacher told me but for today’s kids, source of knowledge is everywhere. So you’ve got to question, what should the teacher’s role be? What should they teach, because the kids are picking up things from everywhere. Should they be teaching them the tools and methods to learn, or tell them specifically what to cram at every stage?
Then there is technology intervention and I just want to tell you how mobile internet technology, based on AI, has simply revolutionized education in a very backward district Banka in Bihar. Working with IIT Delhi, this district has launched a simple Unnayan programme, 'Mera Mobile, Mera Vidyalaya', which ensures quality educational content in their language on students’ mobile phones in multiple forms—print, audio and video—from experts around the world. The best part was: even if a student wasn’t able to attend her classes, she remained in touch with her teachers because Eckovation was an interactive platform, where kids can ask teachers to clear their confusions any time. It also monitored on how they’re doing at an individual level. They could not only learn but also take tests at their own pace.
SS: (smiles) On the contrary, attendance had gone up from 15 to 77% in just a couple of months. Same was true about their performance and marks which too had gone up from 26 to 77%. Class X students did exceedingly well in their board exams. Incidentally, they’ve also done geo-tracking, so they can figure out specific locations in the district where kids were not doing well and find out what the issues were. Teachers were also feeling extremely empowered because they loved the fact that the kids were happily interacting on this platform to get their confusions cleared. So, to my mind, this is the future.
"We are looking into industrial revolution 4.0 and the way things are moving with big automation, Internet of Things (IOT), Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Learning, we’re trying to move fast into new areas. Reason is: Existing job roles will soon vanish and we just can’t imagine the new roles that will emerge. Hence we’re trying to focus on five areas-long-term training, long-term skilling, short-term skilling, recognition of the prior learning and apprenticeship-so that one can fast get into either formal or informal job sectors or become an entrepreneur himself"
Dharmendra PradhanDharmendra Pradhan: With the help of technology, we can do it. Why not? I don’t think there is any problem in scaling up the Banka experiment. Today we’ve things like WhatsApp, Facebook and digital communication which have great reach and they’re market-driven. If we all, policy -makers and stake holders including the government, NGOs and parents, decide that we need to put it on digital platform for better results, we can. We can use both, our conventional curriculum and digital platforms and technology to scale up the Bihar model. We can also take inspiration from other private sector initiatives like the educational models developed by Azim Premji Foundation since last one-and-a-half decade. The way digital penetration and use of internet technology is increasing even in rural India, I don’t see any problem in replicating the Banka or such other emerging experiments on a national level.
DDP: It being his pet project, PM Narendra Modi created a new vertical by forming this Ministry for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. That doesn’t mean in previous years there was no concept of skilling in the ecosystem. But it was the importance he attached to speed and scale it up that made the difference. Till now 22 ministries are giving budgetary allocations for skilling in their domain areas. All the state governments are also spending huge amounts in their skilling ecosystem. Private sector, industry and philanthropic organizations—all are today spending money in this campaign. That’s because there was a challenge; till he took over, only 2.3% of our workforce had undergone formal skill training as compared to 68% in the UK, 75% in Germany, 52% in USA, 80% in Japan and 96% in South Korea. So, PM Modi decided to immediately focus on scaling up skill training efforts to meet the demands of corporate employers and drive economic growth. Result is: millions have been trained under this programme in the last four years but that’s not enough. So, we’re now busy in creating and strengthening a uniform pattern in the skilling ecosystem throughout India with proper online assessments being done by experts. We are looking into industrial revolution 4.0 and the way things are moving with big automation, Internet of Things (IOT), Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Learning, we’re trying to move fast into new areas. Reason is: existing job roles will soon vanish and we just can’t imagine the new roles that will emerge. Hence we’re trying to focus on five areas—long-term training, long-term skilling, short-term skilling, recognition of the prior learning and apprenticeship—so that one can fast get into either formal or informal job sectors or become an entrepreneur himself. Thus, putting this five-fold focused strategy into operation and bringing all skilling initiatives under a single umbrella is one of the policy initiatives of our ministry in the last four years.
Prof Errol D'SouzaProf. Errol D’Souza: Actually my worry is that in this information age, we’re getting more literate, but less educated at the same time. A big factor in education is the ability to integrate the knowledge across the disciplines and the ability to make a judgment call. These are not things that you can learn through the digital platform. For this, you do need a teacher. You do need someone who can take you through the steps of reasoning the logic which is important in a particular discipline. Those are the aspects that we seem to be forgetting. Most education is, in a sense, teaching students how to do convergent thinking, find the right answer. It’s almost like doing multiple choices. There are these four possibilities, tell me, what’s the right answer? But the future is not about that. The future is really about divergent thinking. It’s about being creative. It’s about trying to think in a different format altogether. It’s about taking ideas, playing with them, creating a new environment, looking at multiple logics and system’s thinking because even if everyone is a specialist in his own area, you still need people who are able to integrate across disciplines.
We’re not thinking about these aspects which I think are very important in going forward. These are issues which will plague us 10-15 years down the line. You do need people who are able to be culturally agile. People who can do integrative thinking and yet who are firmly rooted in a discipline that they are trained in and so they know how to think rationally and logically. This is not going to happen by providing more digital platforms and so the soft part of this, I think, is hugely missing. Ten years later, if we still have a Mindmine Summit, we’ll be saying, what did we do wrong?
ED: A lot of learning is going to be flip learning because there is a power in technology. The power is: the basic knowledge is going to be made available to large masses which is not easy to do and that’s what Saurabh has indicated. He said that lot of the education he got earlier was from just the books provided to him. Today knowledge is available on lots of platforms and much more easily accessible. But that makes the job of teaching that much more difficult. It means that kids can come in, having read something about a discipline, and thus make you spend time in doing problem- solving. That’s where the practice part of it comes in. That makes teacher’s part more difficult. We keep thinking of bringing kids to the school which is important even today, possibly only one third of kids who enter first standard, get through to the fifth standard. But, at the same time, same absenteeism rate is there for teachers as 25% of teachers in the last three months in any given school have been absent. This is government data. So, you’ve got to bring both in and that’s not going to be an easy task unless you provide a vision about what it is that the education system is all about? You give them hope for a future and that’s where, when you talk of skilling debate at a tertiary level, I see that the industry has to play a role. The education system can take you up to a level— the skills per se required in a particular industry is best known to that industry and you can see that in the software industry. The top software firms today are skilling people in software and they say, we’ll hire some of them. The rest can go even to our competitors. So, that’s the way to go.
"When I was growing up, the only source of knowledge was the books that I had and what the teacher told me but for today’s kids, source of knowledge is everywhere. So you’ve to question, what should the teacher’s role be? What should they teach because the kids are picking up things from everywhere? Should they be teaching them the tools and methods to learn or tell them specifically what to cram at every stage?"
DDP: (smiles) There are two roles. One, they’ve to measure the demand for their respective industry. Unless we know the quantum of demand, how can we take steps to meet it? Demand has to be met on the ground: in the floor of the service industry, agricultural industry, in the marketplace and so on. Today what’s happening is, though millions of people are getting trained and skilled, we’ve not been able to link them up to the demand index of the country. Demands are not linked to skills which, in turn, are not linked to the Union and State budgets and private sector spending. We don’t know what the industry’s emerging job trends are. There is a missing link and the industry has a role to list out what are the job roles they need. Secondly, they need to help us in providing jobs to those who’ve been trained by our skill councils. So, we need a very strong partnership with the industry. One more suggestion, rather than making skilling a CSR initiative, they should make it part of their investment plan. If we want to have a double-digit economy, we must have quality manpower. But this will happen only when the industry increases its investment in this sector along with the government and the society helps in making it a movement.
SS: I just want to add to what the minister has been saying and why it is extremely important for the industry to get seriously involved in this mission. I’ll give you an example from the software industry. In the early years, when we founded NASSCOM, there was only one degree in computer science, called B Tech in Computer Science, given out by the IITs. We barely had 100 students graduating a year. Now, how could you build an industry out of that? So, we got together with some IIM Ahmedabad professors, did two to three days of brain-storming and worked out a new degree called MCA which everybody adapted because it was a degree that the industry needed. Today, if you look at it, within our own IT industry and NASSCOM, we’ve created a whole new Future Skills Program because 60% of the millions of our people need to be re-skilled. It has gotten to a point where recently, when the PM was in London, the UK Government asked us to actually put it to work in their country. I had done it in my own software company by having a programme with IIT Delhi where we define what we need and they get us the candidates. We guarantee them employment if they finish that programme. So, it’s very important for the industry to get involved.
But there is one more issue and it’s between skilling and education. Since a vast majority of our population needs to have jobs, they need to have the right skills and so we must have an architecture in place which is doing both. I don’t think so far our architecture has had that much focus on skills. It has been more on: Do you have a degree or not?
"The future is really about divergent thinking. It’s about being creative. It’s about trying to think in a different format altogether. It’s about taking ideas, playing with them, creating a new environment, looking at multiple logics and system’s thinking because even if everyone is a specialist in his own area, you still need people who are able to integrate across disciplines. We’re not thinking about these aspects which I think are very important in going forward. These are issues which will plague us 10-15 years down the line"
ED: That is definitely a very important tool but don’t forget that in that augmented reality you have actually programmed out what the person should experience. True education, however, is actually stepping beyond that, at least at a tertiary level. Even at the primary level, it’s important for students to be exposed to larger phenomenon. It’ll happen if they go out and have industry visits and listen to learned speakers coming in their schools like you’re having it here. That’s extremely important.
SS: Technology is an enabler. It allows you to simplify, amplify, multiply, accelerate the velocity, the distribution, the coverage as you can use artificial intelligence to learn things you can feed back into the system. You can analyze the data to figure out how fast somebody is learning. But, at the end of the day, the intellect is still needed, so you still need quality teachers to explain it but our challenge is: we don’t have enough of them. Technology is the only way to take the best of what we’ve got to as many people as we can. That’s why it’s critical.
DDP: I agree with Prof. D’Souza. Education and skilling are two different things. Education gives you empowerment, ethics and knowledge; skilling gives you employability to earn your livelihood. Both are not contradictory to each other. Yes, there are challenges in conventional education system. How do you update your teachers? To do so, you certainly need technology. But for basic education, technology is not an answer. It’s a man-to-man relationship. At primary level, the role of your teacher matters. One word of his in early days will inspire you all your life. That’s the magic and it’s not contradictory to the art of technology which gives you a big jump and new idea in a short time. So schooling and skilling are not contradictory, actually both complement each other.
By Pradeep Mathur
