There is a talent crunch in India right now, and it’s not limited to the IT industry. I was at a family dinner a few days back where the conversation turned to the pharma industry. That too is hurting right now. Salaries are up, attrition is rising, and there are just not enough people to go around.
An economy growing at 9% will double in 8 years. So it will need about twice as many professionals as now. Where will they come from? There are two ways to solve this problem. In the short-term, we have got to make more graduates employable. In the long-term, we need to grow the number of professional colleges.
Even for professional courses, the quality of colleges is so uneven that only a small percentage is really employable. You get a sense of how bad the situation is from the IHT lead story that Anand Giridharadas wrote a few months back. To make more students employable is not easy. This requires fixing the colleges. Right now the curative cycle is completely damped out by silly regulation. Most professional colleges cannot set their fees. Which is just as well since students can’t obtain easy student loans. This kills the incentive of private colleges to get better. Government colleges don’t care in any case. Even if some colleges do care, they are hampered by all kinds of restrictions on curriculum evolution. Finally, as if all this wasn’t enough, most government colleges, even the prestigious ones like IIM and IITs, aren’t allowed to pay market rates for good faculty.
Can this be reformed quickly? Yes and no.
Yes, because the private colleges will become responsive to market needs pretty quickly if the regulatory burden (primarily in the areas of fees and curriculum) is removed and student loans made possible.
No, because the government colleges will not change until the management is changed. And this isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Instead the answer lies in creating more professional colleges in the private sector. These new colleges will eventually put pressure on the moribund government colleges. It’s a 7-10 year cycle but it works. Telecom and banking sectors have used this model to reform the public sector successfully.
In India public policy changes only when there is a crisis. So the real question is whether the crisis has become acute enough to force a change in these last two years of the current government. It’s now not about the policy prescription –the National Knowledge Commission has brought some alignment on that issue recently. Now it’s mostly a question of timing: will it be now or will it be in 2009 after a new government takes over?
I have been trying to get a sense of how the crisis is perceived outside the world of the IT managers and leaders. A friend in the government described the crisis to me like this…
On one side of the ravine, there are 500m people under age 25 wanting jobs. On the other side is the industry hungry for talent. The jobseekers can see the green pastures on the other side but are restricted from crossing over by narrow bridges. What’s more, only some of the narrow bridges are sturdy. Most are so rickety that many job seekers fall into the ravine while trying to use them.
In a convoluted way it felt good hearing this description because this implied that the crisis was perceived to be acute. Maybe change is around the corner after all. “Were it not for hope the heart would break” (a Scottish proverb).
[Ajay Shah has a good overview on higher education India on his blog here. Shailaja Neelkantan describes the recommendation of India’s Knowledge Commission here.]
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