The Hindu Business Line : Make knowledge utilitarian

For the poor, utility is what counts most. Insisting that the poor must have ten years of academic schooling, is like asking them to eat cake when they do not have bread. The education system is designed for the well-to-do by copying ideas from rich Western countries. This, says P. V. INDIRESAN, ignores the need of employable skills.

A MIX of academic education and vocational training can be meaningful to the poor.

The previous article (Controlling growth of disparity, September 4) ended with the observation that eliminating rich-poor inequality is impossible, not even desirable. That is so because disparity is an important driving force for progress. Societies stagnate, even collapse when people have few opportunities to go higher, to get richer. Attempts at absolute equality (as in the Kibbutz in Israel) have all failed. That raises the question: What level of income disparity combines best both equity and progress? For instance, will curbing high wages of the IT industry hurt the poor by taking away their due, or will it help them by multiplying jobs?

Debatable comparisons

International comparisons of income disparity do not inspire much confidence. If the latest World Development Report is to be believed, Pakistan has the same Gini Index of 0.27 as Norway (one of the most egalitarian countries). With a figure of 0.33, India is better than the UK.

Statistics of disparity are evidently unreliable. On the other hand, there is no disputing two facts: In India, (a) earnings of the poor are not enough to buy even food; (b) wages of the rich are not competitive enough to prevent large-scale migration. Hence, we have a problem at both ends.

There are many descriptions of poverty. I prefer to describe poverty as shortage of Maslow Needs. The poor are concerned about the two lowest Maslow Needs — the physical and the security needs. The upper middle-class would be more concerned about higher needs (the status, the autonomy and the self-actualisation needs). Lower needs depend on money; higher ones depend less on money and more on healthy social/economic environment.

Food, water, domestic fuel and clothing are basic physical needs. Only regular income can meet those needs. Shelter, employable skills (plus healthcare) are basic security needs. These three are lifelong assets. Among all these factors, employable skills appear most crucial because they guarantee income. If the skill is good enough, the income will be enough to meet all physical and security needs too. Thus, the resolution of the poverty problem starts with the provision of employable skills.

Big Brother Knows Best

Employable skills involve three factors: the person, the training institution and the employer. In India, training institutions operate autonomously in splendid isolation. They have little or no compulsion or incentive to satisfy either the student or the employer. Currently, the expert view is every student must have ten years of academic education. The theory goes further: Education should not only be compulsory, even its contents should be decided centrally. Students should have next to no choice in what they learn, whether they like it or not, need it or not.

Sherlock Holmes had encyclopaedic knowledge on criminal matters. At the same time, he did not know that the earth went round the sun. When Dr Watson remonstrates about his ignorance, Holmes replies, "Now that you have told me, I will endeavour to forget it because your information is of no use to me."

`Eat cake' syndrome

Holmes had an extreme view about learning but was making an important observation: Knowledge should be utilitarian. The rich can afford esoteric knowledge but for the poor, utility is what counts most. When we insist that our poor (who have not enough to eat) must have ten years of academic schooling, we are echoing the idea that the poor should eat cake if they do not have bread.

Our education system is designed for the well-to-do by the well-to-do who are copying ideas from rich Western countries. They forget that the needs of the poor in India are different from those of the rich economies of the West; that our poor are in dire need of employable skills. Rampant indiscipline in Western schools implies that there too many students do not see value in the education they are getting.

If school education should result in employability, schools should produce the kind of skills employers want. Schools may teach more but only as a supplement and not as substitute for what employers want.

According to the prevailing ideal, children must do what educators decide. In the case of the poor, the reality is otherwise: Poor children do what employers (including parents) decide they should do. That is why dropout rate among poor children is almost 100 per cent. That is why child labour is widespread.

Let us have a compromise: Where parents cannot afford to educate children, let educators decide what a child should do for half the time only; let employers decide what it should do for the other half of the time — on the condition that employers guarantee those children employment at the end of the exercise.

A useful mix

In that case, employers indent students with specific skills, and schools contract to provide them. Educators and the government top-up such skills with whatever else they consider important, but the base is what employers specify. Such a mix of academic education and vocational training is meaningful to the poor. Such a mix alone will alleviate poverty. However, employable skill is not enough by itself unless the youngster can reach the employer. That requires connectivity between the home and the market.

There is one more complication: In villages, employment generation schemes generally fail. According to newspaper reports, even the latest effort, the Rural Labour Employment Guarantee Scheme, is floundering. In contrast, large cities absorb immigrant labour in thousands every week; they do so without any help from the government. Large cities expand; villages shrink. Therefore, if aspiring youth are connected to large markets the employment problem will take care of itself. Without that connectivity, like a flower in the wilderness, even the best employable skill goes waste.

Then, poverty alleviation becomes a two-step process: One, schools provide precisely the training employers seek. Two, houses of the poor are connected to large markets, the larger the better.

Link up villages

The large market problem has two solutions: One, let villagers migrate to large cities. Two, link together enough villages to form a large market on their own. Currently, rural-urban migration is the preferred solution. No one has considered seriously how villages can be linked to generate large markets on their own. Few realise that it is cheaper, two-three times cheaper, to create large markets in rural areas than to enlarge cities.

There are two problems with rural-urban migration: One, cities provide large markets but not homes; they offer slums instead. Two, the purchasing power of money is much less in cities than in villages. The latest craze, the Special Economic Zone, is frightfully expensive. Worse, it devotes no thought on housing the poor, on employment for the poor.

Considering the way SEZs are attracting tens of thousands of crores of rupees, finance is not the problem. The problem is investors do not think it worthwhile to invest in the poor. They do not bother about housing the poor, or about educating poor children, or finding employment for them. The organised sector market is not friendly to the poor.

So far, the government has treated poverty alleviation as charity. Charity does not create jobs. With the Eleventh Plan leaving 70 per cent of the investment to private enterprise, the government cannot let private enterprise abandon the poor.

On the other hand, private enterprise will cooperate only where it is profitable. Hence, the government should make poverty alleviation a profitable enterprise.

(To be concluded)

(The author is a former Director of IIT Madras. Response may be sent to: indiresan@gmail.com)

(This is 184th in the Vision 2020 series. The previous article was published on September 4.)

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