RANDOM ACCESS. Where are the job givers?

I recently had the occasion to address a bunch of journalism students in Bangalore. When I walked in for the lecture, I was staggered by the number of students assembled. That particular institution had a batch strength of 110. Chatting with the faculty later, I found out something even more surprising — there were as many as 72 institutions in Bangalore alone training students in journalism.

If the batch size is similar, that means 7,200 trained graduates are seeking journalism jobs in Bangalore alone — every year. The number of new hires in journalism jobs in the Bangalore area, however, is an almost vanishingly small fraction of the number of new job-seekers entering the market every year.

Bangalore is just a microcosm of the real problem facing India at the moment — and journalism, a tiny fragment of the availability versus jobs puzzle.

Switch to management, and the same problem is magnified by a factor of 10,000. Switch to information technology and you can multiply that by 100,000. Switch to basic college education and you multiply the scale of a problem by a million, and so on, down to unskilled raw labour.

As a country, and as a people, we are very good at spotting a potential opportunity and chasing after it. Scale it to a population of over a billion, and even at the extreme right end of the talent bell curve, you will have a staggering choice of options. That is why we have so many talented cricketers. Cricketers make the most money, so the sport attracts the most number of kids — and the talent bell curve does the rest.

Just a decade and a bit of reasonable growth and the demand-supply mismatch in engineering has reached a level where lesser known institutes are either shutting shop or struggling to fill seats — because word has got around that placements are not that great for tier 2 or tier 3 engineering grads.

It’s not as if the problem is not known to our policy makers. Euphoria over our so-called ‘demographic dividend’ — of having the world’s largest population in the most productive age cohort of the labour pool — has long given way to worry over how exactly we will reap that benefit. However, the solutions attempted so far have all been aimed at one end of the problem — of employability of the workforce entering the job market.

That, indubitably, is a major problem. India’s skills gap is widely documented, and finally spurred the Government into attempting a ‘mission mode’ solution. The National Skill Development Agency (NSDA) was created, which, chaired by former TCS honcho S Ramadorai (a man who knows his onions when it comes to scaling up), has quickly created an ecosystem for ramping up skilling.

To be fair, the NSDA has no misconceptions about the scale of the problem it faces. In a March 26, 2014 article on the NSDA website, Ramadorai himself wrote: “Survey after survey shows that the lack of a job-ready workforce is one of the biggest constraints facing Indian industry.

By 2022, it is estimated that unless action is taken, there will be a gap of 10.3 crore skilled labourers in the infrastructure sector, 3.5 crore in auto and 1.3 crore in healthcare, to name a few.”

Despite commendable efforts, the scale of the challenge is already dwarfing the attempts to plug this gap. According to NSDA figures, the progress so far this year is as follows: Annual Target = 103.68 lakh persons. Reported Progress = 14.91 lakh persons (figures as on June 30, 2014). But even that does not indicate the real problem.

The rate at which the apex skilling body, the National Skill Development Corporation, and its various franchise partners, as well as various Central and State ministries are scaling up their skilling initiative, the target to achievement gap is likely to narrow considerably —especially since the targets are also sensibly being revised based on actual achievement for the previous year, instead of the pie-in-the-sky target of 500 million skillings in a decade plan with which the exercise started.

The real problem is the one faced by journalism job seekers in Bangalore — where are the jobs?

The soon-to-be-extinct Planning Commission was seized of the problem. “India needs to create 1- 1.5 crore (10-15 million) jobs per year for the next decade to provide gainful employment to its young population,” it said in a recent report on the need to create an entrepreneurial ecosystem in India.

Why entrepreneurship? The Commission provided the answer: “Large Indian businesses — both in the public and private sector — have not generated significant employment in the past few decades and are unlikely to do so in the coming decade or two. Public sector and government employment has declined in the last few years, and is expected to grow very slowly in the coming years. Large private sector firms have also been slow in generating employment, which is unlikely to change due to increasing automation, digitization, and productivity gains.”

In other words, the system, as it stands, will be unable to meet the job needs of the country. The solution lies in creating a new system, one driven by entrepreneurs.

Because entrepreneurs, by definition, are job givers and not job seekers. Even a single entrepreneur, opening a tea stall or a vegetable shop, has created a direct job for herself, and probably a few indirect ones in the supply chain.

But do we have the entrepreneurs? Not by a long chalk. The Planning Commission itself estimated that India needed to create 2,500 new, highly scalable enterprises over the next decade — each employing tens of thousands. And for that to happen, at least 10,000 new startups have to be spawned every year, of which 250 will have the potential to scale.

But, current market estimates say that only about 200-400 startups are actually getting off the drawing board every year, and only a tiny handful have started to scale — that too, like Flipkart, more financially than in job terms.

This is the real challenge. From the education system to the world of financial and physical infrastructure, we need to re-focus on how we can help create job givers, rather than job seekers. Without this, there can be no acche din .

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