India’s 21st century economic story has begun to resemble an ODI. If the era of economic growth began in 1991, with the great adventure of liberalisation (Manmohan Singh’s economic “idea whose time has come”), then by 2011, we as a country are headed well into our “middle overs”. Successful ODI cricket teams have middle-over specialists and all-rounders who approach the task at hand knowing they have to build on good starts, but also to accelerate as needed.
It doesn’t take an economic genius to admit that in our current economic narrative, there lurks the great (and perhaps typically Indian) risk of squandering our good start. The time has come to approach the middle overs with a little more imagination and daring, and also with foresight and planning for the ultimate powerplay.
With 65% of our population under 35, India should have a youthful, dynamic and productive workforce for the next 30 years, while the rest of the world – including China – is ageing. But it would be dangerous if, like a batsman conscious that his team has plenty of wickets and overs to spare, we get complacent.
India’s greatest strength is Indians themselves. In every corner of the world, we thrive, compete and often outperform the ‘sons-of-the-soil’. In some sense our cultural DNA is pre-disposed to view material and intellectual success as important and worth striving for. The critical challenge, then, is to ensure that we can foster our human capital base and leverage our demographic advantages.
To get a sense of the challenges ahead of us, consider these estimated numbers. By 2020, according to Goldman Sachs, India will augment its labour force by another 110 million people. Most of these individuals will come from the transition from agriculture to industry. By 2020, the average Indian will be 29 years of age. At that time, the average Chinese will be 37 years old, the average European 49.
Each year, based on 2005 figures, we will add around five million young adults (between 15-24 years) per year. These are five million potentially productive workers. But if they are unemployed or unemployable, they are also potential revolutionaries, Naxalites or stone-pelters. The frustrations of jobless young men lie behind most of the violent protests in the world.
If we get it right – if, like a good batsman, we lay down the platform for a big innings – India can be the production and service capital of the world. Equally, given the size of the youth bulge, innovation could propel global products and research. But if we underestimate the importance of these middle overs, we could lose a lot of wickets very quickly, and collapse in a heap.
Education will be the key ladder on which Indians will move up in life. A great deal needs to be done to expand our capacity, multiplying the number of schools and colleges to accommodate our growing young population. The cut-throat competition we already see in our metros to find spots at good kindergarten schools is one symptom of this profound change.
Vocational training is also essential. Not every young person is going to be reading MRIs or designing the next iPad. We need plumbers, masons, electricians, auto mechanics. There are shortages of trained and qualified personnel in each of these areas. But high-school dropouts can be trained to excel in such fields. We need to set up vocational training institutions on a war footing.
Yet, our focus ought not to be solely on education and training today, but on what we need to do to make today’s Indians employable tomorrow. A badly educated engineer from a second-rate technical college today will, in 15 years, be virtually unemployable, as the complexities of technology and demands of the marketplace increase. Already, many industry professionals bemoan the lack of skilled labour in our emerging technology-intensive economy. Senior executives speak of needing to offer remedial training to freshly-recruited graduates just to make them ready for the rigours of the workplace. Tomorrow, we will need to go beyond, to aggressively expand mid-career retraining programmes.
Upgrading skills mid-career will inescapably be an important part of any worker’s professional life-cycle. Some have woken up to this already. The Singapore government runs a Workforce Development Agency (WDA) which aggressively pursues a “Skills Programme for Upgrading and Resilience” (SPUR) to retrain workers during economic crises. A telling claim that WDA makes is that 75% of companies that would have otherwise fired their employees have postponed doing so because their workers had undergone the SPUR programmes.
At the other end of the spectrum are those who have taken an innovative approach to re-educating our rural communities. Bunker Roy at the “Barefoot College” in Rajasthan’s Tilonia has a “peer-to-peer” model of education to train villagers to be basic service providers. Instead of a top-down approach wherein outsiders come and train villagers, small community members train each other. Not only does this increase labour productivity, it also facilitates cost savings.
Our greatest asset is the Indian people. As a society, we need to aggressively experiment with mid-life or mid-career retraining. If we want to excel at the powerplay, we need to ensure during the middle overs that our children become equally adept at playing the fierce pace of innovation and the slow spin of economic downturns. In the last few years, our economy has hit a few sixes. The time to take a fresh guard is now.
( Tharoor is a Congress MP; Sasidharan is a banker and analyst. )
Name of Source: The Times of India