Privatise education, says Kumar Birla

Noted industrialist Kumaramangalam Birla on Friday favoured privatisation of education for meeting the acute talent crunch affecting the country's corporate and intelligence agencies.

"There are two roadblocks in the way of transforming India into an economic giant and one of them was education. I believe that if education is privatised at primary and secondary level, lot of our problems will be answered to," Birla said, while delivering a speech at the second R N Kao Memorial Lecture at RAW headquarters.

"I strongly believe that engaging the private sector in providing quality education across primary, secondary and post-graduate levels will not only augment the Government's efforts in education but significantly upgrade the quality of education and its relevance to the times," Birla said at the lecture on "Confronting the Great Talent Crunch".

The lecture is being organised in memory of Kao, the first chief of RAW, country's external intelligence gathering agency.

Birla said several universities throughout the world wanted to enter the Indian marker either through tie-ups or independently. "The government needs to take a view on this," he said.

Listing another roadblock, Birla said the country was suffering from improper infrastructure. "We need to put in a lot of effort in building our infrastructure so that we can sustain the double-digit growth," he said.

He added there was a need to expand and strengthen tier-II universities so that those scoring below 90 per cent were not denied entrance into a good degree course.

"We are also woefully short in the area of vocational institutes. We need to increase the number of vocational training seats by a factor of 7-10 at least," Birla said.

Drawing similarities to the problem of talent crunch in the corporate world and national agencies of strategic importance, he said the problem of talent crunch is not alien to the government, which is seeing officials opting out and moving to the private sector.

"Here we can learn from other countries where government agencies participate in the global study on 'Great places to work', attempt to benchmark themselves and showcase their attractiveness as employers," he commented.

Birla said given the scale of economic offences, cyber crime, international money laundering and global human trafficking, agencies like RAW require new and more complex skills of talent. Today, comprehending a serial killer or a hostage taker would be an entirely new ball game he said, adding now agencies would have to understand the mindset of terrorists and religious extremists to much larger extent than ever before.