India's Human Capital, a Bad Economy, and Effects of Unemployment

There is an increased scarcity of skilled labour in India even as many university graduates go jobless due to lack of proper skills training. Despite India having one of the youngest populations in the world, which is a great human resources boon, it does not translate into a positive market force. The government aims to include more practical and skills training components by 2021 but there is a big gap between skill sets needed and job seekers. According to a foil factory owner in Gujarat it takes him 3 years to train unskilled workers from neighbouring villages into skilled workers. This in turn leads to high wastage and inefficiency during this long apprenticeship. Youngsters in cities are opting train in technical institutes as they are market/job-ready at the end of the training period and even have multiple job offers in hand before completing the course. Their peers with degrees, even professional ones like B.E.s (Bachelors in Engineering) and B.Tech.s (Bachelors in Technology), are at a disadvantage in the job market as they are so poorly trained that they require months on on-th-job training before they are ready to contribute to the workforce. Many reports in the media and feedback from recruiters have already marked out fresh engineering graduates from India notoriously inept in the workplace but it is not the graduates fault. Lack of capable professors, well-equipped labs, and other resources to turn a student into a worker is a major problem with higher education institutions across the country. In addition to these problems in the college level India has a marks-mad school system that is so focussed on the percentage a student scores in his/her Board Exams rather than whether the school-leaver is a well-rounded person. These marks determine which college the students attend and in the race to churn out as many 99.9 percent scorers per board what is left is a disillusioned and bored college-goer who in is a disinterested addition to the workforce even when placed instead of jobless. Schools in India rarely produce independent thinkers and innovators. The spirit of enterprise and curiosity is crushed very early in the quest to inculcate the habit of learning by heart in school children. While learning by heart helps to an extent with mathematics and science it is at the expense of creativity. Indias education institutes are churning out job seekers but not job-creators. Both the education system and the licence raj exacerbated by rampant corruption stifle entrepreneurship in India. This is in turn adds to the economic slowdown. Unemployment in youngsters has long-term effects on their health, psychology and wage-levels. Another major concern is the direct correlation between joblessness in the young and civilian unrest. Lack of jobs is a major factor in revolutions across the globe. A slowing economy and growing unemployment amongst the youth contribute to lawlessness and violence. Competition from the entry of women into the workforce in turn breeds sexual violence symptomatized by rape epidemic (one rape every 20 minutes according to statistics) that has gripped the country in the past few decades. In India cheap labour is the norm, even middle-class house-holds have servants. Dignity of labour is a myth despite India being the home of swadeshi movement, symbolised by the spinning wheel popularised by Gandhi, which empowered freedom fighters across the nation. A white-collar job is the Great Indian Dream but increasingly it is the skilled worker who gets a good job. Joblessness among graduates not only crushes the dreams of the young but also of the entire family. In many cases parents have starved, worked double shifts, and mortgaged their land or homes to put first-generation college goers through professional courses. At the end of all their trials and tribulation if a job remains elusive entire families suffer the repercussions as the level of frustration is very high. Employer-educator cooperation as well as public-private partnerships in training students is essential to make Indian graduates job-ready instead of jobless.