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'The education system needs to be remodelled so that students become job creators and not job seekers.'
A revealing excerpt from Virender Kapoor's latest book, Inspiring India: Taking India From Big To Great.
Many Indians wonder: 'We have so many good things -- young workers, smart scientists, skilled managers, natural resources and a 5,000-year-old culture. So why aren't we as successful as countries like Japan, Singapore or those in the Europe?'
'Have we reached our full potential?
If not, why not?
Where did we make mistakes?
Management guru Virender Kapoor's latest book, Inspiring India: Taking India From Big To Great aims to answer some of the important questions that can affect almost 1.5 billion Indians.
'The book will nudge you towards a different perspective about India's rising challenges.
'It may inspire you to take charge and find ways to solve problems related to unemployment, improving entrepreneurship and contributing towards nation building.
'The idea is to make people think about how we can transform India for the better,' says Kapoor, former director of the Symbiosis Institute of Management and the founder of the Management Institute for Leadership and Excellence, Pune.
We present an excerpt from the chapter titled Bootstrapping India: Make India employable -- Schools, Skills And Jobs.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. -- Maimonides
Make people employable; don't think of creating jobs alone.
One thing must be understood: No government has a magic wand to create jobs.
Government cannot create more government jobs to create jobs; that would be the most counterproductive action.
India cannot remain a welfare State and that was done in 1991 when we opened the doors or floodgates towards an open economy called LPG -- Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation.
Yet an adequate amount of water didn't flow out of the flood gates.
Every second person: Literate, super-literate or illiterate in India talks randomly, blaming the government for not 'creating' jobs and the politicians who promise millions of jobs have no clue of what is to be done.
Shortage of jobs is a worldwide phenomenon. Some nations are better off and some are having serious problems.
In India, two things have been done in this direction.
Firstly, there is the focus on manufacturing along with relevant skill development initiatives on a large scale.
Secondly, there is a huge push towards building infrastructure which not only boosts the economy in the medium and long term but also generates rozgar (livelihood).
You cannot make 10 crore (100 million) toilets without people, labour, supervisors and engineers.
You also need material like sand, bricks, pipes, sewerage, cement, toilet fitments and much more for building a toilet. A lot of logistics and transportation go into it.
Highways, airports, trains, mobiles, optical fiber layouts, bridges, tunnels are being built.
How do you think these can be built without labour and manpower?
Therefore, a lot is happening at a speed and scale and it is the greatest achievement.
Yet a lot more needs to be done.
A nation cannot sleep -- in fact it never sleeps.
We need to figure out ways that we require and shouldn't 'cut copy paste' from the western world. They are different and so are we. What works for them may not work for us and vice versa.
The goal of our whole education system is to create people begging for jobs.
The education system needs to be remodelled so that students become job creators and not job seekers. That is why the Startup India initiative has been started.
Any initiative can be criticised but do you have a better idea? If not, then stop criticising.
We need to educate and train our huge manpower -- they must become productive to compete with the best in the world. Some out of the box action is required.
Excerpted and published from Inspiring India: Taking India from Big To Great by Virender Kapoor with the kind permission of the author and publisher, Prabhat Prakashan.
