Prime Minister Narendra Modi expanded ‘Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan, Jai Vigyan’ slogan at the most critical time by adding ‘Jai Anusandhan’. Technology is fast evolving at a break-neck speed. The world order is evolving, and situations prevalent in some parts suggest that there would be a major shift in the power bases who play key roles in the global supply chains. This is India’s opportunity to break free from the sub-8 percent growth rate to gallop to be in the big league of the world economy.
Saying merely that India would reach the position of greater economic glory is not enough though. The roadmap should have actionable agenda that can help the economy take a leap of faith. In this context, the two-day conference in Ahmedabad of science and technology ministers from states and UTs was timely.
Commentaries on the perceived unemployment are commonplace. The fact that misses the attention in the discourse though is the issue of employability. For instance, there is no dearth of reports that claim over 80 percent of the engineers who graduate from the colleges possess the required skill sets. Industry bodies lament that India has a massive talent crunch. This situation is about conventional employments in the areas of IT, civil engineering, and so on. If we talk about artificial intelligence, robotics, space science and rocket engineering, we may be staring at a staggering talent crunch.
In this backdrop, the government’s proposal to create a dashboard to share the best practices in the field of science and technology is praiseworthy. But we may have to look deeper, for the institutions which churn out the skilled manpower are somehow not keeping pace with the fast-changing technological space.
Let’s take the example of the ITIs. They seem to be still operating with the old machineries, and somehow the scale at which they should have become partners in skilling the technical manpower is not taking place. The Gujarat government, as part of its drone policy, has come out with an initiative that makes it mandatory for onboarding one ITI in a district for drone-skilling and solutions. This is worth replicating in other states since the government is working on ‘One District, One Product’ programme.
Now that the aim is to nurture the competency of one specific product in a district, it becomes highly important to do resource-mapping for the skilled manpower, which can be directed to a particular geographical location.
Also, there is no dearth of research institutions in the public and private space in the country. From space to dairy, the ecosystem of such institutions covers every foreseeable area in the country. Some of them have indeed been extraordinary for making stellar contributions to the national growth. But there would be some who may have been laggards.
So, it will be worthwhile to explore if there could be ways to ensure that the outcome of such institutions on fixed parameters be audited annually. Possibly, NITI Aayog can take up this responsibility to create a dashboard, which should also aim at ranking the institutions in a transparent manner on the basis of the outcome, which should have industrial acceptance. This will spur the competitiveness among the research institutions and help them find industrial linkages to further scale up their operations.
NITI Aayog can also take care to seed in its dashboard the international benchmarking so that the relative strength of such institutions, in the public and private spaces, can be gauged, while also making them aware of their gaps.
The industry and research institutions’ linkages should be given an institutional response. The premier institutions in the country such as the IITs and IISc have been well patronised by the pioneering entrepreneurs with grants, but the challenge before the country is to broaden the basket where such fundings could go to hundreds of institutions.
Holland, despite being a small country with much smaller population, is able to dominate the global food market. India has 50 percent of the people roughly dependent on agriculture for livelihood. Yet, we have not done enough for the post-harvest management to tap the global food market. The agricultural research institutions have truly given self-sufficiency to the country in the foodgrain productions, but the need of the hour is for India to become the foremost player in the global supply chain.
Sumeet Bhasin is Director, Public Policy Research Centre. He can be reached on Twitter @sumeetbhasin.