Are You There God? It's Me, Unemployed

HUNGER IS NOT THE WORST FEATURE OF UNEMPLOYMENT, IDLENESS IS

The above lines sums up the current senario of our country. Many would argue that the core objective behind education is to gain employability. They are not far from the truth. Indeed, many organizations that evaluate the return on investment in education do so on the basis of the employability quotient.

As far as India is concerned, the data are quite alarming.There are approximately 18.9 million jobless people in India at present, a little more than 18.6 million in 2018.According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), India has a unemployment rate at 3.5 per cent in 2018 and 2019, the same which was seen in 2017 and 2016.

According to data compiled by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), the unemployment rate rose to 7.2% in February 2019, the worst in 28 months. Meanwhile, the labour force is down 25.7 million since September 2016 and the number of employed persons has declined by 18.3 million in the same period. It's damn alarming!!

There are several reasons behind exponential increment in the unemployment rates:

Lacking aptitude and skills

In India, there are very less quality institutions in spite of the growth in the number of higher education providers. So for an induvidual, it's a herculean task to get admission in the premier institutes. Because they maintain a student-faculty ratio in a way that does not impact quality adversely.A large number of self-financed private institutions have mushroomed to cater to the buldging demand and they themselves lack infrastructure and qualified faculty. Subsequently, when the faculty or the training members are not of any worth then how come their students are going to be of any worth. They become a drain on the economy and India’s, much-touted demographic dividend faces the dire prospect of becoming a demographic drawback.

Conversation Problem

If we see the case of China, the world's largest manufacturer and employer, working on a projects like CPEC etc and if we note that the most spoken language in the world in also Mandarin Chinese. We can make a correlation that a language play a vital role in generating employment. The language that plays a role in a way that throughout the process the language spoken is same. The boss can speak in mandarin Chinese (comfortable for him), the labour can speak Mandarin Chinese(comfortable for him), the domestic consumer can also speak comfortable in Mandarin Chinese and thus making the process far too smooth in generating business.

If we consider the case of India, majority of the candidates that are rejected are not because of their IQ level or their inability to understand thing, it is majorly because of a language that is not ours. So, if there is a dependency on a foreign language, then that arises to a question, why is English given so importance for Business?

Fundamental shift in mindset

Jugaad is not a ninja technique that would help India to tranform into the global power that it aspires to become.This requires a fundamental shift in mindset.

At a fundamental level, it requires changing the DNA of our educational institutions. This requires creating space and a culture that embraces innovation and research. This is not easy and would be time-consuming. While the government has initiated discussion on how this might be achieved, in the interim, it is critical that we should not reinvent the wheel rather we draw on experience and expertise that already exist. In a rapidly globalizing ambience, this is a distinct advantage and also an inescapable reality as well.

Indian students opting for international institutions

Aspiring Indian students with talent and ability are likely to opt for international institutions that cater to their demand. I refer to this as the push factor’; they are being pushed to pursue higher education abroad, simply because India is unable to credibly resolve the demand-supply conundrum in the near future.

Moreover, international education exposes them to global culture and new ways of learning that Indian education has not even experimented with so far!

As per the data, Australia is mostly preferred as a higher education destination. The reason behind this is that at least five of the 33 universities in Australia are in the top 50 of the QS rankings.University of New South Wales, one of the top performing universities for graduate employability.

The big challenge that government faces ishow education may be rewired to focus on imparting knowledge that responds to market demand. In Toffler’s words, how can education make students future ready. Unless it does this, the exponential graph can't be static.