Opinion piece
By Francesca Beddie
The Australian
I went to Hyderabad recently. I didn't intend to but that's where Jet Lite took me. I was supposed to fly from Vishakhapatnam (Visag to those in the know) straight to Delhi and onto Singapore. When I got the call about the change, which meant the flight was leaving an hour and a half early, I was three hours away (I had to be at the airport in two and a half) at the Centurion University outside Parlakhemundi inside the border of Orissa and Andra Pradesh. While the trip caused some high anxiety -- India is the world's road deaths capital -- it added a further dimension to my understanding about skills development on the sub-continent.
From Parlakhamundi to the four-lane highway between Chennai and Kolkata is an hour's drive through pre-Independence India (plus power in most places). Villagers are farmers or micro business people. They grow rice and pulses, herd cattle, raise chickens. They make mud bricks, cut people's hair, tailor their clothes. Others cart hay using oxen or people using three-wheelers, which can hold twice as many as any regulator has deemed. Most towns boast billboards advertising English-medium schools. Spruce children smile out offering hope of a future beyond poor rural life. No placards advertise courses in safe driving or bricklaying. These don't sell...yet.
India's current national government has set itself a target to change this. It aims to produce 500 million skilled workers by 2022. The current annual capacity of the formal VET system is around three million. So there's a lot of scaling (a buzz word in India) to do.
What is meant by skill is not clear. Indian drivers are skilled. The one who got me to the airport in just under three hours -- I fought my way through security (a subject to return to) and got on the plane -- has extraordinary judgment. He was able to negotiate cows, bicycles, three-wheelers and cement trucks; Ambassador cars carrying officials and therefore, in their drivers' view, vehicles to give way to, as well as fools who don't realise a car can be a lethal weapon. He had to do this on the bumpy one-lane rural road and on the highway. Having a painted line on a road means nothing in India. If this guy had a licence, it wasn't the testament to his driving ability -- that's me, who arrived wound up but whole at Visag airport half an hour before the flight. If his fellow drivers had certificates, I'd bet that they bought them without any need to demonstrate an understanding of the road rules. To move forward, India needs to address its traffic problems. Making driving tests real would also help meet that 500 million target.
Security is another area of potential. Try going through three India airports in one day and you'll agree with me. I doubt the military clad guards can actually read much English, rather it seems what they can do is laboriously decipher letters - letters that match the name in the ID you show them. In the days of e-tickets their checks are a farce. If you type up an itinerary with a flight number and your name, and show a passport, you'll get into the airport -- if you don't have pieces of paper, you won't -- but only after you've waited in an unruly queue of others seeking entry. This is neither an effective security measure nor a show of Indian military might. These guards are, I suggest, another target for India's skilling effort. If nothing else, like so many in the service sector, they need some inter-personal skill training.
But these people, who are already in the workforce, are not the main policy focus. In India, talk of education and training concentrates on the young, because there are so many young people and because these are seen as India's demographic dividend. And it is education, not training , that is in sight. Academic schooling, delivered in English, followed by university, is the accepted and longed-for pathway. As in most of the world, getting a trade, even in a country crying out for safe wiring, better plumbing, sound buildings and good service, is a poor option. In India, it doesn't even come with a good wage packet. So why bother?
The people at Centurion bother because they believe in education, and in training; because they want to reach the most disadvantaged -- girls from the hilltribes, young unemployed boys who are vulnerable to recruitment by Naxalite (Maoist) extremists, children of small-scale farmers -- and because they have faith in India's entrepreneurial potential. That’s why they have established Gram Tarang, their social entrepreneurship outreach arm, which also runs training programs in fitting and welding, sewing and electro technology, to impart skills which will lead to employment.
Such dedicated people face decades of entrenched prejudice about vocational training, whose bad reputation is bolstered by the endless red tape and poor outcomes that plague the public VET system. They are bold, enthusiastic, committed. They want to see a private training market and are grappling with how to achieve quality en masse. In short, they want to turn an exclusive education mindset into an inclusive one, which sees the poor less poor, India better run and its people global workers. I just hope that the target of 500 million (sic) by 2022 (sic) doesn't mean that instead they hand out millions of pieces of paper.
Francesca Beddie travelled to India as part of a project to investigate potential VET collaborations supported by the Australia-India Institute based at the University of Melbourne.
Francesca Beddie is General Manager, Research at the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER).