The Hindu Business Line : Get the basics right

LAST week, addressing the 76th Annual General Meeting of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) in New Delhi, the President, Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam drove home some essential truths:

"There has been substantial growth in our higher educational system and we are generating over three million graduates every year. However, our employment generation system is not in a position to absorb the graduates passing out from the universities leading to increase in educated unemployed, year after year. This situation will lead to instability in the social structure."

"To overcome this," the President said, "we have to graduate to 10 per cent gross domestic product (GDP) growth, only then the number of people living below poverty line will reduce to zero from 260 million now." And for that to happen, he argued, "The syllabus at the school level needs a change to create entrepreneurs, and industry must nurture and encourage entrepreneurship."

The President could not have chosen a better time to drive home these fundamentals, even as the country and its leaders are basking in the `feel-good' factor brought on by an 8 per cent growth rate in the economy.

The President could have perhaps pointed to Kerala as a prime example of all that is wrong with an educational system that produces graduates and post-graduates aplenty, but not a single entrepreneur.

Around the same time the President made these remarks, a little known think thank called the Institute of Small Enterprises Development (ISED) released a study titled `Understanding Informalism: A Study on the Industrial Backwardness of Kerala'.

After analysing 115 industrial units in the State, mainly beneficiaries of various Government-sponsored employment programmes, ISED found very little reason to be hopeful of an entrepreneurial revival.

For most beneficiaries, a government programme was just a source of money, a means to make both ends meet, and not a platform for some daring entrepreneurship.

The same spirit is what lures hundreds of gullible Keralites into get-rich-quick multilevel marketing schemes - far easier to make a fast buck than sit down and come up with a bankable business plan.

"Whoever is competitive will be the winner. The law of development states that whoever is competitive will win, whether developing or developed," the President added in his closing remarks to the FICCI meet. Tame and humdrum advice alright, but for a State like Kerala, perhaps getting the basics right is what matters.

The writer can be contacted at kg@tug.org.in

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