I wanted to put this post up many days ago, but reasons unknown I never got around to doing it. President Pranab Mukherjee has been speaking about the pathetic state of education in India for sometime now, the last time being a week or so ago at the Symbiosis University in Pune. On that very day, two other people, one the VC of the Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge and Technology and Chukka Ramaiah spoke about the need to revamp education. Indian education seems to be in a strange place; most of the traditional and older institutions and universities are serving no purpose other than paying salaries to people who should never have been employed at all in the first place. Then there are the IITs, IIMs, the ISBs etc which are training people in specific areas of technology and management and so some of their students are getting huge pay packets. Institutions like IRMA and now TISS have started providing the work force for the NGOs (including the State floated ones such as SERP) and programmes like the PMRDF. The contrast could not have been starker, While the blue chip institutions are preparing their students for high profile and high paying jobs, the latter are training people in social sciences, without going into origin of ideas and their validity, into just being a workforce for the NGOs. The salaries range from Rs. 18,000 per month to about Rs 30,000 per month. The tragedy here is there is no visible ladder that will help the students grow up the value chain. Simply because there is no route for them and NGOs are used by government to reduce the burden of salaries and pensions upon itself. So these people who start as Young Professionals are likely to remain that even when they are old, or may lose employment when a project comes to an end. The students of the other universities seem to just hang around the university as long as they can since they have no where else to go. Why is anything not being done in a concerted manner to make education stop being confined to providing skills for high and low profile employment but for the holistic growth of students?
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 04:43:42 +0000
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