Other advantages SchoolGuru also provides internship opportunities
SchoolGuru offers keen learners several other advantages.

For instance, the start-up’s industry tie-ups help students get internships and apprenticeships so they can get hands-on experience and learn on the job.

Notably, SchoolGuru also offers an employment-oriented programme which helps grasp fundamentals like command over the English language, communication, business etiquette, etc.

Impact: How SchoolGuru is slowly changing the distance learning landscape
In addition to helping distance learning students connect with faculty and engage with learning more interactively, the mobile app approach has also seen enrolment go up, especially in remote areas.

Options to download material also help candidates who do not have stable internet connectivity.

Furthermore, the mobile-based and completely online approach is helping several working people pursue courses as per their convenience.

Authored Article by Shiladitya Ray

Featured in NewsBytes

Curiosity is the foundation of building a resilient career in pursuit of our dreams. And it has three clear benefits. First, it enhances our ability to learn and also helps us retain information longer and more meaningfully. Second, there is a direct correlation between our levels of curiosity and our level of openness to personal growth development and opportunities and our ability to connect with different kinds of people around us. Third, it has immense capacity to quash the stereotypes that we much more easily can get caught up in and helps us develop an open and growth mindset. It’s important the youth of today are encouraged to be curious and inquisitive — they should be encouraged to go beyond the boundaries defined by schools, colleges, and curriculums. And for youth — if you have to defy norms to earn your right to be curious —don’t look back.

I often meet extremely bright, academically qualified youth, however, extremely low in confidence. Confidence is key for youth in their earlier years when they are faced with difficult situations and decisions. Lack of confidence is a breeding ground for low self esteem and it will haunt them later in their lives. Confidence grows from taking action, speaking aloud without the fear of failure. Hence, encouraging youngsters to be participative in group events, speaking out in public forums and taking a stand are invaluable cornerstones in building their self esteem for the future.

For decades, we have created a supply pool of talent, which is excellent at solving mathematical, numerical problems. However, when faced with real life problems, they find themselves cornered. If not all, a vast majority of them. The innate ability of problem-solving and creating value with whatever cards one has been dealt with is what our future hinges on. How we negotiate the unexpected twists and turns when the road is neither even nor straight is what we have to prepare our future workforce on to make them ready for any eventuality. With millennials, my fear is parents have chosen not to expose them to such problems or have taken up the responsibility of solving those problems. ‘If someone beats you up in school, I shall complain to the school principal’. ‘If you cant share a room with your roommate — I shall rent an independent apartment for you.’ ‘If the school bus doesn’t have AC, I shall drop you to school myself’ or better still ‘change your school’. Well such triviality creates the foundation for what lies ahead. We have to expose our future generation to real problems and guide them to look for solutions on their own as early as possible.

What is common among Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Mukesh Ambani (Jio), J K Rowling (Harry Potter), Vera Wang (Vera Wang), Elon Musk (Tesla), Binny Bansal and Sachin Bansal (Flipkart) is risk-taking. Indian society has an antibiotic relationship with risk-taking. Hence, while Indian employees are making the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft speed ahead there are only a handful (4) of Indian names in Fortune List of Top 100 Unicorns 2016 list. Undeniably, we have made some progress in the last few years. However, in a country with a population of 1.32 billion — with the youngest contributing workforce — our entrepreneurial success has been way below par. Children are born with risk-taking abilities. However, with years of conditioning it gets subdued and at some point disappears. As parents, mentors and teachers we have to encourage them towards positive risk-taking — how to cope with the unknown world around, deal with people different from them, how to emotionally handle themselves around ambiguity, etc. All these skills come from experience and taking chances. As someone said, ‘Good decisions come from experience and good experience comes from bad decisions’.

Lastly, it comes down to how to make today’s youngsters responsible for being happy without seeking external validation or gratification. Good mental and emotional well-being is a key ingredient for success of our youngsters. And this inherent happiness helps them build warm relationships at work, home, et al. As parents, teachers, mentors we have to encourage young ones to have a seeking spirit and try out new things, have goals, value personal strengths and focus on the positive things in life.

Above all, its important for them to discern that the gap between their present and their future goals and aspirations is not the source of disappointment but true happiness. As an apprentice in the world of work, I believe, the secret recipe of building a strong career lies in creating our own mix of choices around curiosity, confidence, problem solving, risk-taking and learning to be happy. From my vantage point, I could easily suggest the top 10 job roles that would be in demand six to twelve months from now. But what would really matter is not to build abilities around those specific areas but to make us relevant lifelong, recession-proof and timeless in the world of work. In the words of Lynda Barry, ‘No matter what, expect the unexpected. And whenever possible be the unexpected’.

The idealism of an economic regime built on equality of outcomes resonated with many countries coming out of monarchies and colonial rule, as it should have. But it also confused many of them, including India. Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech before the 1955 Avadi resolution was actually quite logical: “We cannot have a welfare state in India with all the socialism or even communism in the world unless our national income goes up. Socialism or Communism might help you divide your existing wealth but in India there is no existing wealth for you to divide; there is only poverty to divide. Our economic policy must, therefore, aim at plenty. Until very recently economic policies have often been based on scarcity. But the economics of scarcity has no meaning in the world of today.”

But the Avadi resolution led India down the path of economic stagnation, underinvestment in primary education, zero-sum view of competition, kneecapped private sector, and finally banks without governance, culture or consequences (sorry; the last one is better known as bank nationalisation). It was not god’s wish that it should take 71 years for 1.2 billion Indians to cross the GDP of 66 million Englishmen. This dragged-out journey to our prosperity is a consequence of the socialism — Marxism on a diet — that killed our national, firm, and individual productivity. And I’m baffled why the communists didn’t support the Independence struggle in the early 1940s, opposed Constitution writing in the late 1940s, and formally declared war on the Indian state in the 1950s.

The economic apocalypse that Marx predicted never came. Instead his book probably marks the turning point for global progress in food, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, literacy, and individual freedom. And people who believe that today’s globalisation and technology-driven world has much in common with Marx’s mid-19th century world are making the same mistake. Marx — like many gurus pontificating about the future before and after him — was overly negative because pessimists sound wiser than optimists. Wherever he is, I’d love to send him two great books — Progress by Johan Norberg and Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker because I’m confident that reading them would nudge him to revise his unfinished book (most people don’t realise Volume 2 and 3 of Das Kapital were not completed by Marx and were edited by Engels after his death). I also think he would revisit his dim view of us; he viewed Hinduism as “a religion of absolute deprivation” and India as “a country that was a predestined prey of conquest with no history other than the history of successive intruders who founded their empires based on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society”.

Marx was a good writer whose genius was to recognise that we don’t live in an economy but a society. But life is the art of progress, not perfection and Marx was what Einstein would call a “terrible simplifier” who did not recognise the profound wisdom in Princeton Professor Avinash Dixit’s quip that “life is second best, at best”. More sadly, he did not believe in the ability of humans to heal themselves and their stories but believed in the power of forces above our pay grade. Two recurring themes of Urdu poetry — chirag (oil lamp) confronting hawa (wind) and kishti (boats) confronting toofan (storm) — represent the power of the human heart and mind against circumstances. Not only was Marx wrong about the power of the human heart and mind against circumstances — 4.5 billion people have been pulled out of poverty since he wrote his book in 1867 — but he was the spiritual and intellectual inspiration for much murder, violence and pain. Of course, it’s not Marx’s fault that millions died or lived in poverty longer than they needed to but surely teachers must get partial — or full — credit for what their students do. Outcomes matter more than zehniyat.

Though in India flexi staffing, or temporary staffing, is yet to gain traction, the industry is beginning to come of age, with incumbent players beginning to focus on new offerings, increasing investment in technology, improving consultative selling capabilities, and focusing on operational efficiencies while also making their presence felt at the right places. Initiatives like goods and services tax (GST), demonetisation and the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act have opened up this market for newer entrants, and we are seeing newer staffing players entering the organised staffing sector.

In other words, the staffing industry is all perched to make a new leap.

The staffing industry in India over the past five years has been growing at 20–25% a year. It is showing no signs of slowing down because it continues to be in a structural stage of transformation.

While on the one hand, employers are beginning to show their increased reliance on flexible staffing to meet their business imperatives, the regulatory environment in India is also beginning to ease, making it easier for the employers and the staffing players. The future of the staffing industry is also linked to the job scene in the country. We can address the issues of jobs by firstly enabling farm-to-non-farm movement of labour at a faster rate and secondly formalising the non-farm sector in India.

In addition, India would also need structural reforms, especially in the areas of labour, skill development, and higher education, and an enabling regulatory and macro-economic environment for industries, start-ups, and MSMEs to thrive. To improve the productivity of our enterprises, which will ultimately aid job creation, our policymakers will need to push formalisation, urbanisation, industrialisation, financialisation and human capital.

In the immediate future, we will see acceleration on each of these agendas, which augurs well for the staffing industry.

Apart from these, I see five distinctive trends that will have a bearing on the industry and will drive the next phase of growth:

Skill and talent gap issues in India

India Inc. needs an industry-ready and job-ready workforce but is facing an acute talent and skill crunch. More than 60% of the 8 lakh engineers graduating from technical institutions across the country every year remain unemployed, according to the advisory body, the All India Council for Technical Education.

Up to 39% employers state that attracting and finding quality talent is one of the most challenging aspects.Remember, 90% of jobs are skill-based, and only 2% of the population (in the 15–25 age group) is currently enrolled for vocational training, compared with 60–80% worldwide.This apart, talent attraction, engagement, and retention remain a big challenge for most employers.

Against this grim backdrop, employers are looking at contingent staffing in a big way. This represents a huge business opportunity for the staffing industry. The industry has to play its part as well in addressing the skill and talent issue for the economy as a whole.

Rise of the Gig Economy in India

While the gig economy is in its infancy in India, it is expected to grow in the near future, much like it has grown in the US and other developed markets. A recent study by McKinsey has estimated that up to 20–30% of the workforce in developed markets is engaged in independent work. A recent survey by Flexing It, a platform for independent consultants, indicates that more than a third of the 500-plus organisations surveyed in India expect to rely up to 50% on flexible talent in the next five years. This will have a bearing on the talent strategy of organisations, and therefore should be an important area of focus for the staffing companies in India.

The rise of digital staffing platforms

Given the rise in need for contingent staffing, several digital staffing platforms, such as Upwork, Shiftgig, and Catalant have emerged overseas. These companies match the talent needs of enterprises and the job requirements of individuals in a cost-effective manner. They are expected to be present in India. This represents a risk and an opportunity for traditional staffing companies. While they represent competition, it can also force the traditional players to go digital and look at diversifying their offerings and building or acquiring digital platform capabilities. This will also lead to M&As and consolidation, as the staffing players will look to acquire digital platforms to build scale, reach, and access.

Technology as an enabler and differentiator

Technology will become an important enabler and differentiator for staffing companies. They would need to increase their investments in automation for improving efficiencies and technology for improving the hiring and recruitment processes. For example, AI can help automate up to 75 percent of the recruitment process. Of all the staffing industry trends, AI is ready to shake up the marketplace in terms of efficiency. AI has the ability to focus on candidate skill levels over unconscious biases. It will also help reduce the time for sourcing, keep you organised, and help analyse big data. Clients would also expect staffing firms to provide productive employees, not just employees, and this would mean investment in technology-enabled productivity improvement solutions. Staffing firms will need to invest in automation solutions for time, attendance, and expense management to increase operating efficiency and improve accuracy for compliance and approvals. The growth of contingent labor, the transition from on-premise to software-as-a-service-based solutions, and the heightened awareness for tracking the hourly workforce will create demand for technology-aided solutions. It will become an important source of revenue for staffing companies in the future.

Candidate experience and employee engagement

Given that recruitment is a significant cost element, staffing companies need to improve their talent sourcing capabilities to improve targeting while reducing cost. While investment in recruitment technology will be one aspect of this, they also need to focus on a candidate’s hiring experience. Today, social and digital technologies, coupled with newer forms of engagement and assessment through gamification, provide companies with newer avenues to engage effectively with their candidates. Once hired, companies will need to focus on talent from an employee engagement perspective. Millennials have different aspirations, and they have their own requirements from any employer. So it is important to manage them effectively. Candidate experience and employee engagement are critical to building a strong word-of-mouth for the brand, improve the attractiveness as an employer, and driving referrals. Referrals have emerged as one of the cost effective channels for continent hiring, and it will become critical for staffing companies to tap into this.

In the words of Dwight D Eisenhower, “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”. While we can never predict the future, showing up unprepared shall be inexcusable.

Fixed Salary Components

Basic Salary: This is fully taxable. The employees can opt for a lower basic salary to CTC ratio (Existing Basic Salary cannot be reduced however) and add other fixed allowances in the salary structure such as food allowance, telephone, etc. However, a lower basic does not automatically lead to lower tax as some of other components of tax exemptions like HRA (house rent allowance) and Provident Fund are linked to the basic pay. Therefore employees must carefully evaluate the full benefit of a lower basic salary before opting for the same.

Allowances/reimbursements: Allowances includes HRA, LTA/LTC, Mobile / Telephone / Internet Reimbursement, children education allowance, children hostel allowance, research allowance etc. These allowances are exempt at source from tax; however there are limits / rules applicable for the same. For exampler, House Rent Allowance exemption is the lower of the following three – a. Actual HRA received; b. 40-50% of basic (depending on whether you stay in a metro city or other cities) c. Rent paid less 10% of basic salary. Similarly there are other rules and guidelines for other aforementioned allowances and reimbursements as well.

Perquisites: These include meal voucher, health club, sports and similar facility, gift voucher, and company leased car. Here again there are specific rules to be considered. Meal voucher will be treated as nontaxable at Rs 50 per meal up to Rs 2,200 per month. Health club, sports and similar facilities can be considered exempted from tax only if provided to all employees. Gift voucher is exempted if the same is upto Rs 5,000 per annum.

Retiral Contributions: These include provident fund contributions and contribution to NPS or National Pension Scheme. In provident fund, where an employer’s contribution is exempt up to 12 per cent of salary, the contribution made by an employee qualifies for tax deduction up to Rs. 1.5 lakh under Section 80C of the Income Tax Act. Employees with low basic can also claim additional benefit by way of opting for a Voluntary PF. In NPS, employer’s contribution is exempt up to 10 per cent of Basic + DA and that of employee qualifies for deduction up to Rs. 50,000 over and above the limit of Rs.1.5 lakh under Section 80C.

Most employers and employees are now exploring Flexible Benefits which trade one element of a salary package (Basically Special Allowance) for another – Allowances /Reimbursements /Perquisites. According to a recent survey even though flexible benefits account for 10-15% of the total CTC, their perceived benefit for the employee is nearly 40% of the salary package making it win -win for both.

Rasookh, or otherwise influence is key to our success at work place. And that influence counts when we have the ability to influence those who are not directly associated with us. Its easy to influence one’s toddler or one’s subordinate but it is a different skill altogether being able to influence peers or external stakeholders who have little or no allegience towards us. As woman our sensibilities, are inherent ability to empathise puts us at an advantage in our ability to influence – of course only if we choose to exercise as we must at workplace.

Rob or an image of awe is critical for anyone in leadership. Research again shows that women tend to underplay themselves and undermines the importance of creating an aura and “market” themselves. Our need for authenticity usually outscores the need to build an image which is larger than life and aspirational thereby being counterproductive in our career progression.

Rishtey or our network and relationships on the professional front have important consequence in our career progression and several study shows that women do this very differently from men leading to different outcomes. Women tend to focus on fewer yet deeper relationships with those with shared values and that leads to a limited network. Its important for us women to break out and learn to get along with those at work place beyond our likes and values. Sponsorship and visibility are key ingredients for growth for women at all levels.

Each of these four factors are interdependent and interrelated. Absence of either leads to undesirable consequences. Before our environment changes, as women, we need to be the change we seek it is matter of time the rest shall follow. For that we simply cannot sit back and watch. Instead lets lead from the front “Each time a woman stands up for herself , without knowing it possibly, without claiming it she stands up for all women.”

Featured in Financial Express

India has 63 million enterprises but doesn’t need that many — the US economy is eight times our size but only has 22 million enterprises.

More importantly, 12 million of our enterprises don’t have an address, 12 million work from home, only 7 million were registered for indirect taxes pre-GST, and only 1.2 million pay into the mandatory employer social security program.

This massive informality is not only dangerous for its sense of humour about the rule of law but is painful because of the huge drag on productivity that murders the wage premium and formal wage employment. And we must be careful about positioning the gig economy in the world, but this is also the only reconciliation of our 4.9% unemployment with 40% of our labour force being working poor (they make enough money to live but not enough money to pull out of poverty). India does not have a jobs problem but a wage problem, and the only way to make self-employment viable is to increase the productivity of our enterprises.

Improving the productivity of our enterprises needs policy to push five things: formalisation, urbanisation, industrialisation, financialisation, and human capital.

Formalisation because formal enterprises have access to credit, human capital, technology, etc that give them the productivity to pay the wage premium (the 50% increase in the number of registered enterprises post-GST is an important early outcome).

Urbanisation because there is a massive divergence between real and nominal wages in our big cities that is blunting migration (we only have 52 cities with more than a million people compared with China’s 375).

Industrialisation because the only way to help farmers is to have less of them, and that needs massive non-farm job creation (50% of our labour force in agriculture only produces 14% of our GDP). Financialisation because financial savings and digital payments create access, credit, and track records (the 0.1 million transactions per month on UPI have gone to 126 million this month and will touch a billion in one year). Human capital because enterprises can’t manufacture their own employees, and our school, skill, and college system is not producing employable output. Enterprises cannot substitute for the state, and the biggest gift to entrepreneurs is a state that does less so it can do more in the areas that make India a fertile habitat for job creation.

Formal, private job creation — as evidenced by Provident Fund and ESI payers — has grown by more than 20 million over the last few years.

These may not be jobs, but there are new formal jobs. And recent reforms — demonetisation, GST, RERA, the Bankruptcy Act, shell company evisceration, ease of doing business, Aadhaar, UPI, etc.—are starting to reinforce each to create an entrepreneurial ecosystem that creates babies (small formal companies that grow) rather than dwarfs (small informal companies that stay small). Economists have often used the words informal, unorganised, and small interchangeably.

Informal is illegal, but there is nothing wrong with small. India will create many honest, small and formal enterprises over the next decade. Some of these enterprises will be self-employment. Some of them will stay small. But many will grow to offer the productive wage employment that India’s youth need.

Featured in Economic Times

Focus on technology is a dire need of the hour, but not knowing how to use it will simply replace black boards with smart boards, registers with Excel sheets, and manual attendance registers to biometrics. This increases productivity and frees time, but not knowing how to use the time can be detrimental to our education system. The Internet has a place in school, but kids in elementary level can live without it. We have experienced how children can adapt to technology very fast.

There is a consistent feedback from the industry which says they are not looking for technology skills, which can be taught very quickly, but for skills in writing and reasoning, work habits, ability to concentrate, and ability to have face to face communication. The children of today need to know something about the problem before they use technology to solve the problem. Most education systems across the world, India being no exception, are built around the concept of industrial production system. They fail to realise that education is an organic process akin to agriculture. The prime task of the teacher is to prime students with curiosity and inquisitiveness, and learning would naturally happen.

It is not an easy task to solve India’s education problem. Usage of technology and the government’s initiatives to spend money behind it are laudable. It needs a lot more work, though.

India’ trinity of problems in education include solving issues of cost, scale, and quality, which is not easy for any solution to fulfil, be it technology or policy. There is a dire need to re-look at curriculum, classroom environment, and the entire pedagogical processes. Finally, it has to lead to unlocking the imagination, creativity, and critical thinking of the child. And last but not the least, the teacher is central to good education. If education has to improve, there is no way it is going to happen unless the teaching improves.

The current policy changes are a signal in the right direction, and investment in technology is surely a badly needed step; necessary but not sufficient.

The original sin in labour market data and strategy comes from the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (Arjun Sengupta report) that not only created confusion between informal enterprises and informal employment data but also surrendered by treating informality as undefeatable. To reuse a wonderful metaphor of Avinash Dixit of Princeton, informality is not like cancer but obesity. We must not think of informality as cancer, insisting that every malignant cell must be removed or will not come back. Instead, informality should be compared to being overweight or obese. The fight against obesity is hard and slow; victories are partial, and sometimes you regress. But keeping up the fight by all methods and at all times can mitigate obesity. Eventually the diet and exercise will become a way of life, and a healthier body will yield tangible benefits.

Informal employment is the slavery of the 21st century and arises from our sense of humour about the rule of law. This sense of humour shows up in transmission losses between how labour laws are written, interpreted, practiced, and enforced. Why do only 1.2 million of our 63 million enterprises pay EPFO or ESI? But it is becoming tougher for enterprises to hide; the 50% increase in GST-registered enterprises to 11.5 million means that EPFO payers should be closer to that number than a tenth of it. By holding our bad employers accountable, we stop handicapping our good employers. The task of formalisation is far from over; we need to amend all labour laws to adopt the IndiaStack (paperless, presenceless, cashless), replace our 25+ numbers with a unique enterprise number, and move forward on a single labour code (instead of the proposed 3 or 5). Our current labour laws need overhauling because they choose the old over our young.

India’s poverty industry draws inspiration from Karl Marx but clearly doesn’t take his advice: “You can describe the world in thousands of ways. The point, however, is to change it.” India’s labour market has new data and many new formal jobs. Now, that is change we haven’t seen in a long time.

Indian IT companies have gracefully transitioned three S-curves—mainframe, client-server, and internet—but their ability to reinvent themselves over the next 10 years depends on a massive re-imagining of their people supply chain. Training will need to be shorter and more online. Organisational structures need to morph from cylinders to pyramids on their way to Eiffel Towers. This means sharper performance management that may include a replication of the Colonel Threshold of the Army (if you are not shortlisted for promotion at this stage, you retire early). Committing to campus hires a year ahead with no clarity in demand has led to postponed or unhonoured offers that are bad for brands; fresher hiring will need to move to an apprenticeship model that creates learning-by-doing and learning-while-earning but allows employers to take students for a test-drive. Employers will also need to explore, prepare, match, and deploy partnerships with universities for just-time supply. And employee costs needing to be more variable than fixed, which means that a larger proportion of the workforce will have to be on fixed-term contracts. Finally, delivery models where groups of people from various horizontals worked in an inefficient linear workflow need to be reconfigured into a collection of full-stack development with industry expertise.

With the employment in IT shifting from a lifetime contract to a taxicab relationship, employees will have to think about their personal brands, continuously upgrade technical skills, and nurture soft skills. Upskilling is key to the wage premium; a programmer with Java /C #/Python skills can become more relevant in three weeks along with database skills in Mysql/Oracle/MS-SQL. An 8-10% wage premium comes from three weeks of investment in HTML/JS /CSS. A 15% wage premium comes from a four-week investment in server-side programming skills like servlets/JSP/Struts/Spring/Hibernate with familiarity of frameworks such as EJB that starts the journey into becoming a full-stack developer. Another 20% wage premium comes from four months of intense learning of more server-side programming using the Groovy/Grails/Django framework and learning niche front-end development skills like Angular JS/React JS. At this point, the programmer should choose an industry vertical and spend another 2 months becoming MEAN by picking up skills like Mongo DB, Node.js, and Express.js. The rest of the year can be spent picking up Python, R, Hadoop, and AWS/Azure. Extending interactions with colleagues in Infra will help relate to server management and the impact of code on the performance of applications. The employee, at the end of three years, should hence aim at having a set of keys that opens any doors to the web at a premium she commands. Employers will be increasingly frugal with training budgets, but employees have options that include external certifications, MOOCs, building applications for fun alongside a community to practice, code challenges, and hackathons.

There are important upsides and downsides for education policy makers. The downside is that the huge wage premium in IT meant that annual engineering capacity expanded from 3 lakh to 15 lakh over the last 15 years, but the demand-side for 3 lakh freshers per year will not change soon. This means excess capacity will need to go off the market, or its hardware and software will have to be rejigged for other vocations. But the upside is that engineers will finally be available to other professions; this synchronises with the surge in India’s spending and hiring for domestic consumption and infrastructure. This shift—if supported by regulatory change—could greatly expand vocational universities, apprenticeships, and online learning. The notion that India’s IT employment will decline is delusional; the future is bright but is different from the past. But the future does lie in IT companies making their brittle people supply chains more flexible.

The first step is policy makers accepting that the future of jobs is unknowable. The 50+ reports by various countries predicting where jobs will be in the future have the efficacy of palm reading or astrology (more than 50% of the jobs created in the US in every decade since the 1960s did not exist in the decade before that). Universities traditionally delivered a wage premium because a) the Gross Enrollment ratio – the percentage of kids in college – was small and thus signalling value was high; most honest alumni will agree that IIT is a good place to be at but a better place to be from, and b) Economies and companies were more stable and predictable before the advent of globalisation, digitisation, and automation (the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company has come down from 65 years to 15 years in the last 68 years). Does the future lie in jobs that are blue-collar (machine-facing), pink-collar (computer-facing), or white-collar (people-facing)? Nobody knows, and as change to the world of work accelerates, the job of education policy makers is not to predict the future but to make the system self-healing.

The second step is policy makers accepting that the future of university education is unknowable. Is it Physical classrooms or Online classrooms? Text or Multimedia? Degrees or Apprenticeships? Study before working or continue education? Or creative combinations? We recognise that our vision of a future of university education – on-the-go, always-on, on-the-job, on-site, on-demand, crowd-sourced, and gamified – will probably horrify traditional university academics. But nobody knows who is right. Unfortunately, traditional academics have captured regulators with their definition of a university that confuses university buildings with building universities. India needs policy space for innovation—allowing a number of statistically independent and genetically diverse life forms in higher education – that is impossible with the current mindset of prohibited till permitted.

These two steps lead to the third: a bold policy agenda that destroys the regulatory cholesterol in the next budget. The legal context of universities must be revamped by separating the policymaker, regulator, and service provider. Policy must recognise that large universities that pray to the one god of employers can coexist with small universities that focus on research and knowledge. This means equivalence for learning delivered on-the-job, on-site, online, and on-campus. And it involves lifting the ban on online education for all Indian universities (state or central, private or public, young or old). The role of policy is not to set things on fire (decide what higher education looks like or pick winners and losers) but to create the conditions for spontaneous combustion. Our regulatory cholesterol has not only hindered innovation but also created an adverse selection in higher education in both the private and public sectors; the hugely prescriptive, subjective, and hardware-obsessed norms mean that most higher education entrepreneurs are either criminals, politicians, or land sharks. And the lack of autonomy for public institutions means that there is no fear of falling or hope or rising for teachers or leaders.

An MHRD report last week suggests huge progress in quantity; we have 35 million students in higher education in our 51,000 colleges and 864 universities. Our three-year goal should be 50 million students. But everybody must be employable and pay lower fees. This is impossible without online delivery and vocationalization.

Source: First Published in Business Standard, 19 January 2018

Public cautioned

“We came to know that some agents are collecting bio-data promising jobs in Enayam port,” said a port trust official.

Nor is this an isolated case: virtually everyday, companies and banks put out advertisments cautioning the public against such fraudulence.

All preliminary work related to the establishment of a major commercial port at Enayam is being dealt with by a cell formed with VOC Port Trust employees.

The recruitment of permanent employees will begin only after incorporating a company/Trust; all such recruitments will be made by the port authority based on government guidelines after duly advertising such positions, the official said.

Fake offers galore

Kunal Sen, senior vice-president of TeamLease Services, a recruitment agency, said fake job offers peak in June-August, when companies make campus offers.
Recently, the Delhi Police registered an FIR following a complaint by the Tata group. Police say there are over 50 fake call centres in Delhi-NCR duping job seekers by collecting money with promises of jobs in MNCs.

According to Rituparna Chakraborty, President, the Indian Staffing Federation, fraudsters hoodwink the youth through fake advertisements, emails, and SMSes. They demand upfront payment from candidates as a registration fee, which is a sure-shot indicator of fakery.

Youngsters from small towns fall victim and even give away personal details about themselves, which can be misused, she said.

This article was published in Hindu Business Line.