The Hindu Business Line : Of good roads and HR challenges

While there are no two opinions on India’s indifferent progress in infrastructure, it comes as a rude shock to know that we are hardly geared to meet the HR challenge of the coming decade, says RASHEEDA BHAGAT, summing up the radical views of Infosys’ Director-HR, Mr T.V. Mohandas Pai, at a recent interaction with Business Line Club.

Recent travel to South Africa, and particularly to its tourism hotspot Cape Town, which has a strong European presence in terms of cultural influences and people, was an eye-opener. Apart from its lush green environs, this Indian visitor was struck by the cleanliness of the city; you cannot find litter or garbage on the streets and the smooth, pothole-free, multiple-lane roads in Cape Town are bound to make you cringe when you think of the apology for roads that our so-cal led vibrant and progressive cities of Chennai or Bangalore have to offer.

How long will our governing classes make us sweat to get some decent infrastructure? The Chennai traffic flow scored over Bangalore till a couple of years ago, when the IT denizens there protested about the pathetic state of the Bangalore-Mysore Road and the rest grit their teeth and battled with the increasing traffic that the IT and ITES related wealth put on the city’s roads.

Look at the chaotic traffic scenes in Chennai; how do Thailand or Malaysia manage to put such huge flyovers/elevated highways in place so rapidly while we in Chennai have to watch years go by before one small arm of the Kathipara flyover near the Chennai airport can be thrown open? Anybody who has tried to drive through Chennai’s T. Nagar area recently, as the flyover at Pondy Bazaar is being built, would have had a hellish experience.

Though it is true that if you want new facilities, you have to live with the resultant chaos while these are being created, why should these projects undergo such infernal and painfully long delays?

One is justifiably proud of the India growth story, and is at pains to point this out to sceptics overseas who have embedded in their brains only the images of a poor and shortage-afflicted India. But such lectures don’t count for much when you return home to comparatively cramped airports and chaotic and dirty roads.

While there are no two opinions on our indifferent progress on the infrastructure front, it comes as a rude shock to know that we are hardly geared to meet the HR challenge of the coming decade.

The HR challenge

Addressing a meeting of Business Line Club in Chennai on Saturday, Mr T. V. Mohandas Pai, Director-HR, Infosys Technologies, said India today has a GDP of $1.25 trillion; “if we grow at 7 per cent a year for the next 10 years — and I do believe this is possible as China has grown at 9 per cent a year over the last 25 years — we will double our economy in 10 years to reach $2.5 trillion.”

Another spurt of 7 per cent annual growth for the decade after would take the Indian economy to a staggering $5-trillion mark.

All these are heady numbers and can go to one’s head, but not what Mr Pai had to say next. He estimated that today in the formal sector, we have 6.5 crore jobs, of which two crore are in the government and 4.5 crore in the private and public sectors.

So, if our GDP doubles in 10 years, we are going to need 6 crore more people who are adequately skilled, educated and trained. Where is this number going to come from? If this is a difficult number to imagine, just think about 10 crore people being required to run a $5-trillion economy in the next 20 years!

While this is the requirement, what is the response of our government to this challenge? As Mr Pai pointed out, we have an outdated and out-of-sync vocational education system and a woefully inadequate network of colleges and universities that are required to prepare the talent pool for tomorrow’s India.

At present, we have only 450 deemed and other universities, 18,000 colleges, and 11 million young people in colleges.

Against other emerging markets having an enrolment rate of 25 per cent in the age group 18-24, and developing countries a 52 per cent enrolment rate, we have an abysmal enrolment rate of 11 per cent in higher education. “We produce 400,000 engineers, maybe 35,000-40,000 doctors, 125,000 MBAs and around 12,000 accountants.”

In an aside he added that today a chartered accountant gets an annual package of Rs 10 lakh “the day he finishes his CA; when I passed my CA in 1982, I could earn only Rs 500 a month and had to borrow money from my mother for petrol for my vehicle!”

Broken system; ‘60s mindset

On a serious note, Mr Pai added that while the crying need was to raise the enrolment rate of our young population to 25 per cent in higher education to meet tomorrow’s HR challenge, “all we have is a broken down education system, the only saving grace of which has been the private sector, and a restrictive, totalitarian regime in New Delhi which is spoiling the future of our children and driving them away outside.”

About 200,000 young Indians are studying abroad, spending a total of $4 billion because we don’t have enough quality educational institutions in this country to train them.

He said India produces only 3.5 million graduates a year, and, of these, 70 per cent are from arts, “doing courses such as History in the local language.” In Rajasthan, “where we are advisors to the State government, we met a young man at the village square who was an MA in Political Science in Hindi. When asked why he had chosen this subject, he said the bus left the village at 11 a.m., reached Jaipur and returned at 3 pm, and in-between this was the only course available.”

He urged the audience that comprised vice-chancellors, principals and senior faculty of colleges to examine the implications of having a group of graduates “where 70 per cent have degrees but they can’t even talk.” While faculty shortage in colleges was a huge problem, the scene in our schools was even worse. Add to this a total loss of interest in the younger scholars to go in for research, and the future looked bleak.

Anna University Vice-Chancellor Dr D. Viswanathan, who was in the audience, sketched the typical scenario in engineering colleges where the brightest of the B.Techs were recruited by industry. “Those who can’t get jobs go for M.Tech, after completing which some of them get employed.” Those who fail to get jobs once again “do their Ph.D and become faculty!”

Uncluttered minds

Mr Pai urged the audience to consider the adverse implications of young minds shunning research, and called for a national science foundation to give grants for research to universities.

A study of Nobel Laureates had found that most of their discoveries had come before they turned 30. “Why? Because when you are young your mind is uncluttered and you dare to dream.

“If Asia is going to be the dominant power in this century, we have to get our young involved in research that drives innovation and this can come only from vibrant universities.”

Making a pitch for allowing private and foreign universities, he batted for a “market place for education where the young are empowered to go to any university of their choice,” with the poor students getting merit scholarships.

And such universities should have autonomy, be allowed to charge fees of their choice that would enable them to attract the best faculty by paying them just and market wages.

“The key challenge in education is management and handling people, and this can’t be done in New Delhi. The Knowledge Commission says we need 1,500 universities; we have just 430. For a 1.1 billion population we surely think small!”

This kind of radical thinking and provocative speech is rare from the corporate world, where senior executives always walk the tight-rope. Mr Pai did not spare the hijacking of the entrance exam systems by the coaching institutes.

He said that while 200,000 students write the IIT entrance exam and 4,500 get selected, nearly 3,000 of these are from coaching classes run by institutes from Kota in Rajasthan.

He said Infosys co-founder Mr Narayana Murthy, who sat on a committee to give Rhodes scholarships, had told him how he could not select the first-rank holder from IIT, Delhi, “because he was no good; he had just crammed and couldn’t explain or answer questions.

We have created a structure where young people have to go to cramming classes to get into IITs and IIMs.

When I asked my son to go to a coaching class for IIT entrance, he said I don’t want to go to IIT because I don’t want to cram, I’ll do something else. And I said fine.”

So apparently, we need much more than good roads!

Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

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