SPEAKING
FREELY India fails test of 'knowledge
economy' By Pushkar
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
Indians are doing
well in the knowledge economy. India is not. There
is a misconception in some quarters that both are
making rapid gains. The fact is that Indians based
outside India continue to make impressive gains in
the knowledge economy but India's achievements
remain quite small. For example, a recent study by
Thomson Reuters found that only 3.5% of the global
research output in 2010 was from India.
The misconception that India and Indians
are on the fast track on
the knowledge economy
freeway owes much to the influential writings of
Thomas Friedman on China and India in the New York
Times. He followed it up by the best-selling
The World is Flat (2005), in which India
was announced to the world as a country that was
producing thousands of engineers and scientists at
a time when fewer Americans were enrolling for
degrees in the sciences and engineering.
In positioning China and India as emerging
challengers to continued American/Western
dominance in the knowledge economy, Friedman
glossed over the fact that only a small fraction
of the thousands of engineers graduating from
India's colleges and universities - public or
private - are employable. Certainly, few (if any)
of the engineering graduates of Lovely
Professional University - which recently featured
in a Chronicle of Higher Education story on the
poor quality of private universities in India -
are likely to be able to be employed as engineers.
The World is Flat sold very well in
India. And why not? Friedman had good things to
say about India and Indians. India has
historically received scarce praise from
influential Western commentators, so it is easy to
understand how Friedman's ideas - that technology
and innovation has leveled the global playing
field so that countries like India can eat big
cookies - were so easily consumed and celebrated.
Outsourcing was going to be the solution to
India's problems. Indians were great innovators
and if - as Gurcharan Das put it - India's economy
could grow despite the state, everything else was
possible.
The same year that The World
is Flat hit bookstores, McKinsey & Co
released a report on the supply of offshore talent
in services. Among its findings, only 25% of
engineers in India were suitable for working with
multinational companies. Not many Indians read it.
Very few Indians are also likely to have
read Richard Florida's rebuttal to Friedman
(Atlantic Monthly, October 2005). Florida found
little evidence of a "flat" world. As he pointed
out, India in 2003 generated 341 US patents and
China 297. The University of California generated
more patents than either country and IBM five
times more than the two combined. Florida did find
Indians and Chinese to be incredibly innovative
but much less so in their home countries than in
the US.
There are few signs that US
dominance in the knowledge economy will wane,
thanks in no small part to its open-door policy
for Chinese and Indian researchers and innovators.
According to a recent study in Nature magazine,
17% of the scientists in the US are Chinese and
another 12% are Indians. It is quite probable that
these Indians have a higher research output than
India-based scientists.
The reason why
India's contribution to the knowledge economy will
remain limited is that its higher-education system
is in a complete mess. As early as 2006, the
Indian government's National Knowledge Commission
brought attention to what it generously called a
"quiet crisis" in higher education. Since then,
more resources have been committed to higher
education and massive expansion plans are underway
to educate the millions of college-ready Indians.
While there are some signs that things could
change for the better, for now, the higher
education sector remains "backward".
The
country continues to produce thousands of
graduates but recent surveys are hardly
encouraging. India's actual pool of skilled,
employable workers remains relatively small.
It is evident that India's colleges and
universities are not teaching students what they
need to learn. At the hundreds of public
institutions around the country, there is not much
teaching going on anyway. As a result, most
students are forced to spend a fortune on private
tuition or enroll at private institutions. Both at
public and private institutions, the course
content is dated - often by a decade or more - and
unconnected to the job requirements of today. In
addition, whatever is taught is not taught well.
Devesh Kapur (University of Pennsylvania)
and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (Centre for Policy
Research, New Delhi) do not mince words when they
state that "the veneer of the few institutions of
excellence masks the reality that the median
higher education institutions in India have become
incapable of producing students with skills and
knowledge."
The skills crisis among
India's young population is in large part due to
pervasive shortages of qualified faculty. In a
recent interview, Shyam Sunder (Yale School of
Management) observed that: "Our best brains are
selling soaps and getting into civil service" but
"we are not able to attract them to a sector that
is most important to us - education - particularly
higher education." As a result, even prestigious
institutions - like the Indian Institutes of
Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management
- are facing a shortage of qualified faculty. As
higher education undergoes further expansion,
these shortages can only mount.
The
illusion that both India and Indians are making
gains in the knowledge economy is in part due to
the relatively large number of high-profile
India-educated innovators and entrepreneurs whose
achievements are celebrated in Indian newspapers.
It becomes convenient to ignore the fact that most
are US-based and at best have a second-base in
India.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
Pushkar has a
Phd in political science (McGill University) and
is based in Gurgaon, India. He is a monthly
columnist for EDU
(http://www.edu-leaders.com/resources/magazine)
where he writes on India's higher education. He
has previously taught at Concordia University,
McGill University and the University of Ottawa in
Canada.
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