Skilling Fields
[Business Today]
Published date: 21st Mar 2011
View PDFFrom the Editor
Then we had to find the rule and the string again, and a new hole was made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up — very crooked and insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed down with a rake, and everybody hot and wet and wretched — except Uncle Podger.
— Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome
Best by bad news in every newspaper I pick up, and saddened by the huge natural disaster that struck Japan and the Pacific Rim as we went to press, I thought it would be just ‘on trend’ to say something trite with two nasty questions that crop up time and again when Business Today meets industry and business leaders: Is Uncle Podger an army of Indians unskilled bumblers? And are Indians really, truly employable?
Should we not, powered by our hackneyed demographic dividend, be springing into Economic Powerdom? If we do not skill half a billion Indians over the next decade, we could be orphaned as the world’s most populous also-ran. Will we find enough technicians, accountants, salespeople, engineers, or even electricians, plumbers and automobile mechanics? “About 95 per cent of the Indians coming out of the school system are not employable,” says former CII area Ganesh bluntly in our cover story (page 52). Associate Editors Sumant Banerji and Shamni Pande, aided by a lean team of BT writers, enjoy the challenge is stiff, but the resolve too fix the problem is stiff, too.
Skill and labour shortages are starting to cause economic pain in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, which go to the polls in mid-April. The DMK has turned Tamil Nadu into a deficit welfare state, while tourism is dropping off and West Asia turmoil is imperilling remittances in Kerala. Senior Editor N. Madhavan and Associate Editor T.V. Mahalingam complete our trilogy of election-economy investigations starting on page 64 (for West Bengal, see our Feb 20 issue).
Revolts and revolutions can come suddenly. India’s old-subsidy regime is crumbling, though it needs time and courage to challenge. One way out of the low-funding mess is India’s nuclear power capacity: But that brings its own protest group and social sabotage, as Senior Editor Rajeev Dubey found at Jaitapur in coastal Maharashtra, in a truce between nuclear engineers and land-hungry miners.
You will also enjoy reading the chronicles of the Indian car wars (Page 89) and the fiercely refreshing dispatches of our new luxury magazine (Page 40). The Fortis-Religare tie-in simmers in bold ambitions.
Talking about ambition, I was reminded of another literary gem: Leo Tolstoy’s 1885 fable about greed and mortality, “How Much Land Does A Man Need?” In it, the peasant Pahom, provoked by his better-off sister-in-law, thinks to himself: “If I had plenty of land, I shouldn’t fear the Devil himself!” The Devil is listening. “All right,” thought the Devil. “We will have a tussle. I’ll give you land enough; and by means of that land I will get you into my power.”
You will have to read the whole story to find out what happens to Pahom. Tolstoy seems like a contemporary storyteller if you read about the binge by major property developer Unitech that has dragged it into a financial morass. Unitech’s promoters, the Chandras, have also felt the Devil’s hot breath from the 2G scandal. Associate Editor Shalini S. Dagar (page 82) spent several weeks picking her way through a tale that really takes the biscuit.
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