Skill DB
Right now, I am sitting on a sofa, in my room and reading a book. The air is chill and there is a 50% probability of rain. Right above my head, on the terrace, there is a guy who is cleaning the floor with a wire brush, removing the muck, moving mud pots around and applying a coat of water proof paint across the terrace. It is very hard labor. Just the thought of that aches my legs. I can probably attempt it for a day. But I cannot do it all my life. So why am I thinking this way while he is fine doing that hard job ? This is the disparity that exists all across our society. Some are born poor, some rich. The poor ones have to slog it out, while the rich ones can take life easy. But why would anyone given a choice end up doing hard labor ? The choice would not have been there for him. Or it was there and he was lazy enough to catch it. Or he actually is happy doing it. Which one is true ? It is difficult to tell. I guess if I talk to them, most would say that they did not have the opportunity. Either, they had to skip school to take up a job or they went to school but could not get through for various reasons.
This is were I feel that children have to be treated equally in a society. They need to get educated compulsorily. Until a point their mind is developed to make a choice of their livelihood. When they leave school, they should be able to write an essay on why they are leaving school and what makes them feel the road ahead for them is what they want to become. The reason cannot be lack of money. The reason cannot be lack of skill. If they say any of these, then they should be made to sit through school until they gain knowledge or skill in an area they like. Till then they should not worry about food, shelter, clothing. It should be Government’s responsibility. When they decide that they like to work in an area, then after verifying they would like to do that work and they have the skills, they should be let go. This may sound a little draconian. But I feel this will not allow the possibility of freedom of choice to be thrown into the gutter. Children are the assets of this society and Government has to parent those children who cannot be taken care of by parents until they can fend themselves in a meaningful way.
The Government is the biggest enterprise. They know which industries are going to set foot in different parts of the country. Imagine a precondition to issue a license to an automobile factory is to enter the spread of positions and skills it needs across years into a large database. And the Government now has a dashboard of all the types of skills, knowledge, qualifications across the country across years. Imagine the same database has details of schools and students graduating from schools and colleges across the country. Doing a intelligent match will help to know the skill gap. Creating more institutes to address this gap and exposing the available career paths for students and professionals will result in taking a measured step towards a greater nation.
Today we have a ministry for Education, for Human resources, for Industries. But they are not integrated towards a common goal — that which channelizes human resources through the pipeline of Education, Skill building and Jobs. They are scattered in their goals and hence what we see around us is the outcome of it. People with skills cannot find jobs they want. Employers with Jobs cannot find skills they want.
That is the reason we import more than we export. Because we cannot make many things on our own. If we want to have favourable BoP, we need to prepare the ground locally with skills of our people and address the need. We need to create institutions of higher learning to improve our Education, to make our own goods and services that addresses our needs.
We had relaxed as a nation since Independence indulging more in socialistic policies and to bootstrap out of poverty we had to jump on the globalization bandwagon. While it helped create jobs and increase the wealth of the society in general, the money created in the economy as a result of the jobs were broadly eaten by corruption or crony capitalism or in social welfare measures. Very less was spent on improving the pipeline of local needs -> jobs to address needs-> skill to do the jobs -> education to gain skills.
