The need of ‘Out of the box’ skills for the Indian Youth.

-Gaurav Agashe

India is a remarkably young country. Half of the Indian population today is under the age of 25. In fact, we have 234 million Indians ready and poised to enter higher education. This is significantly in contrast to the ageing population of the rest of the world. Today, most of the supposed superpowers of the world have their average population age into late forties while in India, it is as young as 28. India currently harbours the youngest, most dynamic and ready to work population in the world. But the obstacle arises when we drive the conversation from “how many young people do we have” to “how many of them are equipped for professional jobs”. For truly transforming our economy, more than this demographic dividend, we need a workforce with merit. Expansion has been our primal priority since independence and for good measure because we’ve skyrocketed from our 16% literacy rate during 1947 to 74% today. We’ve jumped from our 26 universities to almost 700 today. The IITs most notably have a distinct reputation worldwide but as Dr Shashi Tharoor remarkably said: “they’re the islands of excellence floating on the sea of mediocrity”.

The subject of the matter remains, an average graduate from our country is simply not up to the virtue or calibre expected by the employers, neither in India or anywhere else. The Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry did a survey and discovered that 64% of employers are not satisfied with the workforce they’re getting. The resolution shouldn’t be the elucidation of thousands of potential employees because of their incompetence because that’s just completely redundant and a blight on our education system. This issue should be addressed well before the employment juncture, it needs to be resolved during the higher education of every potential worker. The government can only take us so far and we need to ask ourselves why we have 17% of the world’s brain but only 2.8% of the world’s research output?

In the era of the internet and Google, we hardly need our students to know when the battle of Plassey was fought, we need them to react to stimulus and new information effectively. To acquire skills not only limited to reciting, but also for creating. It doesn’t start and end with our textbooks because they are no linear path to excellence, but rather a curve which coincides with skills beyond our textbooks. More than people who remember all the facts in the book, we need ingenious students who employ that knowledge in beneficence. The skills pertaining to employment are not constrained to knowledge, but also application. And if we incorporate these skills into our youthful and varied workforce, to quote Shashi Tharoor again “The kind of role played by China in the last generation could be ours in the next”.