Disastrous Industry-Academia Disconnect

For the paradox of an acute shortage of skilled personnel and a rising tide of unemployed youth which defines the Indian economy, the country’s academy is increasingly – and – rightly being faulted:  Dilip Thakore Although according to spokespersons of the ruling BJP-led NDA government in New Delhi the Indian economy has the highest rate of GDP growth worldwide – a claim not quite supported by the indices of industrial, agriculture production and services and export data – there’s an ominous shadow looming over the nation. India’s demographic profile – 242 million youth are in the 15-24 age group – indicates that 12 million enter the employment market every year. Against this, employment generation in the economy despite doubling of the annual rate of GDP growth after the historic liberalisation and deregulation Union budget of 1991, has averaged 5.5 million jobs per year. Therefore a huge backlog has built up over the years. According to Census 2011, the number of registered educated unemployed aggregated a massive 47 million. But two years on, the acche din (good days) and vikaas (development) economic policies promised by former three-term Gujarat chief minister and incumbent prime minister Narendra Modi – a promise that prompted the electorate to vault the BJP into power at the Centre with the largest majority of any political party since 1985 in General Election 2014 – haven’t yielded jobs anywhere near that scale. According to a statement made in Parliament on August 10 last year by Union labour minister Bandaru Dattatreya, 357,000 “employment opportunities” (jobs) were generated in fiscal 2014-15 and 41,000 under the Prime Minister™s Employment Generation Programme (PMEGP) in the first quarter of 2015-16, a figure nowhere near the 1 million jobs per month which need to be generated within the economy. Moreover, as per a news report in the Indian Express (April 15), “new jobs in eight sectors of the economy – textiles, leather, metal, automobiles, gems and jewellery, transport, information technology and handlooms – fell to a six-year low of 135,000 in 2015 as against 4.21 lakh jobs in 2014 and 4.19 lakh in 2013. This is also the worst record of new jobs in October-December quarter in the last six years. The next quarter was no better with the number of jobs generated by these critical labour-intensive industries rising fractionally to 1.35 lakh, according to a report in Livemint (May 11). Even the few million jobs generated by Indian industry and particularly the services sector which currently contributes over half of the country’s annual GDP, aren’t really jobs at all, and disguise massive under-employment. Describing the operations of Frontline, a highly successful Patna-based manpower recruitment firm with annual sales of $185 million (Rs.1,246 crore), in a prescient feature story, the London-based weekly The Economist (May 11, 2013) commented: “Yet Frontline is also a symptom of a colossal failure. For it is not supplying labour for a manufacturing boom of the kind that helped so many in China, South Korea and Taiwan out of poverty, or…