Congress MP and former union minister Shashi Tharoor on Wednesday said India was staring at a demographic disaster and it had wasted the last five years when it came to skill development.
Mr. Tharoor said India would be able to utilise its demographic dividend only if the young population was equipped with the right skills. He was speaking at a 40-minute session on Empowering the Young at the Economist India Summit 2018.
The other panellists were V. Ramgopal Rao, director, IIT Delhi; C.P. Gurnani, MD and chief executive, Tech Mahindra; and Chetna Sinha, founder of Mann Deshi Foundation and Bank.
The job scenario
Mr. Tharoor said, “My worry is that the demographic dividend is all very well, but what about the disaster that stares in the face? We have 5,00,000 engineers and 62% of them are in jobs that don’t need them.” Mr. Tharoor said parents were driving children to take engineering degrees that are not relevant to the marketplace.
He said, “It’s good to encourage startups, but how encouraging is the startup ecosystem? Offering tax breaks for the first three years to startups won’t help. How many of them make a profit in that time?”
Mr. Rao said people say IITs do not rank among the top 100 institutions in the world despite being one of the best in the country. He said, “I would like to say that our research impact scores 90 out of 100 in the world. Our electrical engineering course ranks among the top 49. But we score a zero in when it comes to foreign students, foreign faculties and R&D. The Central government has given us an opening on the first two fronts, while we will have to be more relevant on the R&D.”
Mr. Rao said the future was in graduates creating startups. He said, “Last year, only 5% of IIT students went abroad. They wanted to stay back and make a difference.” He said the IIT of 10 years ago was very different from what it is today. He said, “A lot of transformation is taking place in the IIT system.”
Ms. Sinha said in the technological era, when blue collar job growth is slow, future growth and prosperity must be built on the cornerstone of education.
She said, “New skills will enable graduates to find jobs by meeting the needs of modern, tech-driven companies. Yet, too few Indians outside major cities have access to high-quality education.” She said young rural India is aspirational and doesn’t consider itself poor and backwards. “They don’t want the government to provide poor solutions to poor people,” she said. Mr. Gurnani said the skill gap and the digital divide was real.
