Something has really wrong with our planning of livelihood. It is time to awaken to appropriate our social engineering
Only a foolhardy person will never have self-doubt. The best of us have had our doubts and wondered about the state of affairs around us.
The media is often full of scandals, scam, contentious issues, not to talk of reports on murder, rape, theft, fraud, shortage of one utility and other items the list is long. To wake up in the morning with such news is depressing, and to wrap up the day with the same issues is equally depressing. That is the way it is.
leader after leader and political party after political party has claimed to be the champions of development. So be it. Facts, however, are difficult to ignore. let us begin with a look at the standards.
The Government of India has a definition of poverty line where people earn less than Rs26 per day in rural India and Rs32 per day in urban India are defined as ‘poor’. This amount is reportedly adequate to buy rice/wheat from a public distribution system.
It is calculated that according to this benchmarking, there are 290 million people below the poverty line. The well-heeled, especially those who are intellectually anchored abroad, have drawn up this definition.
looks amazing, because the need to cook food and, therefore, have fuel, is not recognised. The need to spend on covering oneself is not factored in. Yet, the great industry of economic planning is flourishing on these assumptions.
This is not all. Out of the workforce of approximately 490 million, 93 per cent of the people work in the unorganised sector and approximately seven per cent are in the organised sector.
More than half the population makes its living through some self-employment process. All the Indian Institutes of Management, the Indian Institutes of Technology, all Central universities, cater only to the seven per cent referred above.
None of the IITs/IIMs has a reputation in the field of small and medium-sized enterprises or anything related. Indeed, in one of the IITs, in one of the departments which had built some reputation in the field of entrepreneurship studies, the courses in the field of entrepreneurship were duly scrapped when the last course-revision took place over a year ago!
Globally in the age bracket 15 to 35, it is estimated that 80 per cent learn a vocation or skill or a trade. Vocational educational training programmes run into thousands, with the number of modules catering to them adding up to tens of thousands.
The UPA Government talked, and more than it the NDA Government talks, of skill development councils. In India, we have not even crossed the framing of a thousand courses in different classes of vocational education. The potential coverage of the population which could get formal vocational education and training remains less than five per cent of the population. There are over 2,500 trades. Very few traditional trades have found a way into this list.
If figures speak, the above narrative is enough to ask about what has really gone wrong with our thinking and planning of livelihood. Nor is this all. Estimates have it that only 12 per cent of the total eligible population crosses the 10-plus two stage in the learning universe.
Yet the rush, jostling and melee for graduate and post-graduate admission seems endless. One is inclined to wonder if this will be the situation, if proper options were available and genuine advocacy had been undertaken to educate the people what livelihood generating learning is about.
Some of our assumptions are equally mind boggling. In popular perception if you can write your name, you are literate. That does not even enable you to read a railway timetable!
Of course, in such an age to talk of digitisation is fashionable. That is not something one can have quarrels with. However, it is difficult to get over a gnawing feeling that a predominant percentage of the thinking and mental spaces are taken up, at the national level, by issues which service the progression of the elite.
This is not a happy situation. It needs to change. Ignored too long, involuntary forces released by nature may seek to reset the equilibrium. Then, much good may be thrown out with chafe. There is a need to awaken to appropriate, indigenously-grown social engineering.