India doesn't have a labour shortage, it has a skilled labour shortage,” Tom Captain, global aerospace and defense industry leader at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, said. India has the youngest workforce in the world but, is it the most skilled one too? There was a time when the entire world use to look towards India for its engineering skills prowess.
The period during which the Indian skilled resources were high in demandstarted around the mid of the last decade of twentieth century and continued till early part of the second decade of twenty first century. In the last about eight years the technology has advanced with an unfathomable speed. Has skill development in India moved with the same speed?
Make in India was one of the first ambitious schemes started by Prime Minister Narendra Modi which was launched as soon as he came to power in 2014. In the initial part of scheme lot of Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) started to flow in and about $110 billion was pumped into the country in the first two years.
The IMF quickly came forward to mark India as the fastest growing economy. As destiny would have it, after the initial investment there was a sharp decrease in the FDI. Everyone started blaming the government for its policies. The Government was quick enough to respond and the key sectors were reduced from 25 to 21.
Out of the many reasons responsible for this setback for the government, one was the unskilled labor. The Government in its good intention to bring FDI in manufacturing sector did not see the preparedness of its people, process and technology. Let's take Aerospace and Aviation industry.
Boeing came up with the biggest investment and could not find good skilled labor in India to deliver its products, why? Who should be blamed for this? In the wake of new technologies coming to the forefront faster than before, businesses across the world are grappling with a tedious problem of matching up the pace of these technologies. Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Robotics and others are taking over the business processes.
Are we fast enough to develop our skills for these developments? Our best of the engineering colleges are falling down in the world ranking. They are facing major challenges related to their course structures, faculty and research. How do we make changes to our course structure? How do we prepare our faculty for the fast changing technology? How do we conduct futuristic research in the most agile way? These are not simple questions. A section of young generation which is aware and has identified these issues are eyeing for the courses outside our country. This will result in two major problems for this country — one, that due to brain drain the brightest of the brains will leave this country and two, that we will be left with sub-standard skills who will find it hard to find jobs.
Anyways, not far is the time that most of the logic based jobs will replace humans and thanks to AI and robotics. There is a clear gap between the pace of change and the pace of our adaption to change. This gap will further increase and result in lesser jobs for our engineers and technicians. Creative jobs involving human skills will thrive.
The present Government has to think more and think fast on these urgent requirements. We should commend this Government for thinking big and thinking good. However, thinking alone doesn't help. Planning the right courses, mandatory up-skilling technology aided trainings for the teachers, quick insights from researches are required by this Government.
Forget about Make in India, the country will not be able to make at all, if the current pace persists. There is an urgent need to give attention to the present education system.
The writer is Achal Sharma, author of CorePeelers: A Journey To Your Core. He is also a coach and a speaker