An authored article in People Matters Magazine talks about how the GST Bill will create a single unified market that will benefit will India Inc.; along with inputs from Rituparna Chakraborty.

The GST bill is the big bang reform that is aimed at creating a single, unified market that will benefit the corporates, economy and the youth of the country.

Through the recent passage of the 122nd Constitution Amendment Bill for GST (Goods and Services Tax) in the Rajya Sabha on 3rd August 2016, India has committed itself to replacing the various layers of indirect taxes on goods and services levied by the States and Center, and implement GST by April 2017.

Some of the salient features of GST are: (a) All forms of “supply” of goods and services made for a consideration shall attract CGST and SGST; (b) GST shall apply on “Supply” and all other earlier taxable heads such as “manufacture”, “sales” and “services” have been made redundant and irrelevant; (c) the liability shall arise only at the point of supply; (d) a single document for tax purposes and a single return filed with a central registry; (e) 7 Central Indirect Taxes & Levies and 9 State Indirect Taxes & Levies subsumed by GST hereby.

It’s the big bang reform in the Indian context aimed at creating a single, unified market that will benefit the corporates, the economy and the youth of the country.

Let’s look at the opportunity ahead of us:

• It is expected to make it easy for corporates to predict costs of products manufactured or services rendered across the country and improve enterprise productivity.
• For sectors that have been impacted positively (assuming a GST of 18%), they shall witness an increase in profitability through reduced average tax burden.
• Uniformity of tax structures opens up market beyond favorable territories. At the moment, the complex intra-state variances in tax structures have been a hindrance for many companies to look at nationwide reach.
• Expansion of services, capacity and product range on account of either increased profitability, predictability of costs as well as broadening of the market.
• Less protectionism amongst states and more innovation. The current structure tended to protect local manufacturers to the extent that they became less competitive and invested less in innovation, stunting their possible growth.
• Variablises current fixed costs through seeking input credit.

The sectors which are expected to immediately gain from the new bill are:

• FMCG – Huge savings to be registered for this segment on account of savings in logistics and distribution costs as there would be no need for having multiple sales depots. The savings or gains to their bottomline, one can safely assume, would be invested back into the business by way of introducing new product categories and penetrating deeper across the country. Hiring outlook is expected to improve significantly for this segment.
• Media – Their taxes are expected to go down by 2-4%, lowering their costs. With lower ticket costs, footfalls in theatres and entertainment spots are expected to go up. Film makers and studios for the first time stand to enjoy input credit as so far they were part of the negative list. This means more opportunities for the entertainment industry and as the sector being considerably manpower intensive would lead to newer jobs.
• Auto industry – Over the last couple of quarters, this sector has been fairing well and with about 8% drop in costs, it is expected to fuel more demand. Being a labor intensive sector, this augurs well for job creation.
• Cement – Infrastructure development has been a policy priority and with the positive impact of cement, it would be an added boost.
• Logistics – Probably one of the biggest winners from GST would be the logistics and distribution sector. The changes could reduce transportation cycle times, enhance supply chain decisions, lead to consolidation of warehouses, etc. which could help the logistics industry reach its potential in terms of service and growth. This sector over the last 2-3 years has created a significant number of job opportunities especially for youth who are lesser skilled and have fewer means to livelihood. The positive is expected to open up doors for more youth.
• Ecommerce – The unified market shall definitely lead to smooth movement of goods and products. Finally with elimination of the various layers of taxes, burden of which falls on customers, the ecommerce sector shall witness greater efficiency in costs. This sector has been the go to place for our youth seeking employment opportunities across all skill levels – this augurs well for sustained job creation.

In addition to this, one expects gains for mobile handset companies on account of lower distribution costs, lower product costs, which will spur demand. Elimination of multiple levies shall also help Digital Companies in making deeper forays. Overall, all sectors shall benefit from the streamlined process of filing returns given that there would be a single point of entry, lowered distribution and logistics costs, and increased predictability in costs structures.

Needless to say, to take advantage of the opportunities ahead of us, staff augmentation would be key and that would lead to massive formal job creation.

The five specific consequences of this event are:

1. To explore new territories, to introduce new product range, there would be a need to hire and deploy a distributed workforce nationwide leading to a spike in new formal jobs.
2. Demand for skilled manpower shall go up leading to an added emphasis on building skills across roles and functions.
3. As one cannot seek input credit without ensuring there is evidence of GST being paid by partners, suppliers and vendors, it automatically weeds out informal players or forces them to comply paving way for mandatory formal job creation. In one stroke, laying down the systematic path towards fast paced formalization of our workforce.
4. Labor intensive sectors have received a massive boost from GST and would be leading from the front in contributing to creating new formal jobs.
5. GST creates a positive image in front of global investors making India a lucrative destination for them to set shops – thereby a ray of hope for our youth.

While it is premature to estimate sectoral additions in number of jobs, however, it is safe to assume that GST will create millions of jobs in the years to come. Let us take an example from e-commerce. In the state of UP wherein e-commerce companies were restricted to selling only goods up to Rs. 5000 lest the customer are dragged out of their houses to a tax office to complete complicated paper work, wherein a warehouse in Karnataka has been an unviable option on account of double taxation – all this goes away enabling possibility of higher sales in UP, greater efficiencies in Karnataka, lower cost and faster delivery – each of which can be actualized through the requisite manpower at the right places and in adequate numbers. One can predict that three biggest beneficiaries in the new jobs created would be those in sales, customer service and logistics amongst others.

The wait for GST to be passed has been long, albeit worth the patience and also is a symbol of how there are times when we need to look beyond our idealistic differences and do something that paves the way for a better future for our country and for our youth. For once, good economics scored over politics and cheers to that!

An authored article of Manish Sabharwal in Mint talks about how the 2017 Union Budget recognizes that India’s problem is not jobs but formal enterprises.

A government focused on jobs should focus on formalization, infrastructure and human capital. This budget did a good job on two out of three

The 2017 budget reinforces the government’s strategy of a) sticking to fiscal responsibility and lower interest rates as more effective than tax tweaks or populist spending, b) creating conditions not for setting things on fire but for spontaneous combustion of formal enterprises, and c) adopting the long view where a 10-year plan is not 10 one-year plans. The first point is politically significant half-way into the government’s term because India’s only two fiscally prudent prime ministers, P.V. Narasimha Rao and A.B. Vajpayee, did not get re-elected. The budget reinforces India’s global brand—not hot, not cold, but consistently warm—for the demand side (enterprises and demand) but I wish it was more aggressive on the supply side (human capital).

The budget recognizes that India’s problem is not jobs but formal enterprises.

The budget recognizes that India’s problem is not jobs but formal enterprises. (Of our 63 million enterprises only 1 million are companies of which only 18,000 have a paid up capital of more than Rs10 crore.) Anybody who wants a job has a job—our official unemployment rate of 4.9% is not a fudge—but they don’t get the wages they want or need. Formal enterprises have the productivity to pay the wage premium, and the budget built on GST and note ban to encourage formal enterprises. No tax liability for up to Rs2.5 lakh income, the tax rate of 25% for 97% of enterprises, the re-emergence of labour reform via four labour codes, the abolishment of Foreign Investment Promotion Board, the 25% infrastructure spending increase, the acceleration of road construction, the programmes for labour intensive sectors, 100% village electrification, and reforming the tax department’s human capital and procedures will boost employment.

But it missed low-hanging fruits such as the single universal enterprise number (replacing the current 25-plus numbers), announcing a deadline for enterprise PPC (paperless, presenceless and cashless for all compliance) and fixing the gap between salary on the offer letter and the take-home pay (the 45% deduction for low-wage employees that goes to poor value-for-money schemes operated by government monopolies).

The human capital announcements—UGC restructuring, focus on school learning outcomes, apprenticeships, etc.—were interesting but should have been more substantial. The budget acknowledged the importance of technology in education but did not lift the unjust ban on Indian universities launching national online campuses.

This budget’s structural innovations (early presentation, merging the rail and Union budgets and ending the silly plan and non-plan distinction) probably mean that budgets are morphing to what they should be: a statement of accounts and intentions rather than a forum for reform announcements. But India must recognize that China’s five labour market transitions—farm to non-farm, rural to urban, subsistence self-employment to wage employment, informal to formal and school to work—was easier not because it does not have the fixed costs of democracy but because it started reforms in 1978 at the start of a 30-year supercycle of global growth, manufacturing outsourcing, and global trade openness.

The global weather of the moment—Trump’s election, secular stagnation, the threats of automation, Brexit, etc.—mean that we should hope for exports and manufacturing but can no longer postpone difficult land and labour reforms that will spur domestic consumption driven by higher wage services employment.

One of the most interesting questions in economics is the role of the government in job creation. Ronald Reagan once said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English Language are I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. Much has changed since the 1980s and India’s problems of the state are no longer sins of commission (what it does wrong) but sins of omission (what it does not do). Our government does too much of what it should not do and too little of what it should do. A government focused on jobs should focus on formalization, infrastructure and human capital. This budget did a good job on two out of three.

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This article was published in Mint

Just in time hiring has given way to predictive hiring. To be able to do this, IT companies are increasingly segregating skills as made to stock and made to order skills based on business projections, skill value and skill availability. Hiring specialists add more value to the business by focusing on made to order skills; this becomes possible only when made to stock skills are hired using predictive hiring processes. Predictive hiring, in turn, calls for large-scale sourcing automation. Bots that use structured job descriptions and ideal candidate profiles are increasingly being employed to crawl job boards, assessment platforms, tech communities and just about any other ecosystem to trace digital footprints of potential hires, build a candidate profile and parse the information into internal systems for creating a qualified talent inventory.

“Meanwhile, deep learning techniques similar to those used by marketing specialists to predict and influence consumer behavior are now increasingly being used by hiring specialists to design, launch and manage campaigns to attract right candidates for made to order skills or combination of adjacent skills. Information is the new oil; hence any information about candidates in form of digital profiles or resumes are now being appended into internal company databases and updated continuously using parsing engines. Such parsed information is then used to execute the next big area – matching.

Lower cost of search and onboard can be achieved only when hiring teams run efficient matching engines. Large volumes of unstructured data, fatigue, and bias lead to inefficient matching resulting in sins of both omission and commission. Therefore, matching engines are the first priority area where companies commit investments to add on to their existing applicant tracking systems. Natural language processing techniques are used extensively to make sense out of unstructured job descriptions on the demand side and resumes characterized by very high standard deviation and large volumes of parsed data on the supply side to identify, assess, stack rank and present best fit candidates for a given job with high levels of accuracy and consistency. Over a period of time, machine learning technology improves the accuracy and consistency even further as they integrate with performance, engagement and attrition data.

The fourth area of investment, hiring process automation refers to a suite of interdependent processes being automated to increase the throughput of supply to cater to demand. As hiring transforms from being a process execution job to a sales role, the repetitive, logistical aspects of the hiring process are getting automated.

First, the initial calls to prospective candidates to check interest and basic qualifying criteria are now being handled by synchronous two communication methods like automated voice response systems and asynchronous one-way communication methods such as messaging. Second, much more qualitative profiling of candidates is being done by companies by partnering with assessment companies that specialize in testing candidates for specified proficiency levels of desired skills. Third, the first level in-person interviews of candidates involving heavy logistics are being replaced by either live video interviews or proctored video recordings that can be used for reviews by multiple hiring managers. A combination of automation of initial calls, industry certified, baselined, platform-based technical profiling and video interviewing not only increases the throughput of candidates but also brings consistency in the first level process. Finally, block-chain based technologies accelerate the background verification process and make it far cheaper over the long run, thereby reducing time to onboard a lot further.

Most of the technologies mentioned above are not disruptive in the real sense but have been used in multiple industry verticals for at least a decade now. However, the adoption of these technologies in HR is late but definitive. In the next few years, integrated hiring processes that incorporate these technologies are expected to increase the productivity of recruiters by 3 times, increase the throughput by 3 times and halve the cost per hire.

“While companies adopt these technologies, job seekers are expected to respond to this adoption by way of increasing their digital footprint in forums that matter, invest in their own skill building to be able to differentiate themselves, constantly seek to be mile wide in familiarity with technologies while being mile deep in specializing in chosen areas of interest and be open to diverse experiences across employers.

Finally, as discussed earlier, companies are better off focusing on their core work of transforming their clients’ businesses by building their people’s capabilities to innovate and deliver. As liquid workforce models become more and more prevalent as a legitimate employment mode in IT companies, the primary employers of the liquid workforce should now be committed to building a technology led talent supply chain ecosystem using new age technologies.

 

This article was published in people matters

While there are complex cultural, sociological and even economic factors at play behind these statistics, women’s safety itself is a primary area of concern across the country; what varies is the severity.

There is much that can and needs to be done by us, as a society and a country, in terms of changing the overall ecosystem so that more women can participate in the workforce.

At the same time, as women, we need to do our bit to ensure a safer environment for ourselves both at the work place and outside of it.

Here are some safety tips every woman should keep in mind:

Be aware of your surroundings at work and en route to work, especially when you are travelling alone.

Keep a family member, friend or colleague informed of your whereabouts.

The more you pay attention, the less likely you are to be surprised.

Be confident and informed of your rights 

In any potentially unsafe situation — physical or otherwise — your ability to fight back depends as much on your mental strength as anything else.

It is important to understand that you can and should defend yourself physically should the need arise.

Be informed of your rights; there are several legislations — like Prevention of Sexual Harassment of Women and Right to Privacy that require employers and society at large to provide the necessary work environment and grievance redressal mechanism for women.

It is also legal for a woman to carry and use pepper spray when in any kind of danger.

Trust your instincts and step up to the occasion.

Take your time before you trust people in your professional space 

While the idea is not to be overtly suspicious or distrustful of people, it’s advisable to exercise caution for your own safety.

Setting appropriate boundaries with work colleagues and enforcing them is a part of it.

Say NO when you have to, and be assertive.

Watch your use of social media

Be careful of the friend requests you accept and how much you reveal about yourself on social media in terms of your personal details, daily routine, etc.

Remember: The more information you reveal about yourself online, the more vulnerable you are.

Safety first

If your work requires you to travel out of station alone or travel late nights, exercise extra caution.

Take support from your employer in terms of safe transportation, boarding and other facilities that can help ensure your safety.

Sign up for a self-defence class 

If you travel alone late at night, or live alone and travel at odd hours for work, basic training in self-defence is highly recommended.

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This article was published in Rediff.com

India’s problem is not jobs but wages, and living wages won’t come from regulatory fatwas but formalisation (our 60 million informal enterprises don’t have the productivity to pay the wage premium), urbanisation (2 lakh of our 6 lakh villages have less than 200 people and can’t become job magnets), and industrialisation (the only way to help farmers is to have less of them). GST and demonetisation make wonderful down payments on all three priorities but need follow-up with a smarter, smaller, and simpler state. We can no longer dance around difficult reforms in land, labour and city governance (elected, empowered mayors).

The most interesting question of our times is not whether the world is better off thinking itself as one unit or every country should first think about itself, but whether it’s politically possible to think of the world as one unit. Unlike economists, the tension between humanity and community is obvious to politicians because “all politics is local”. India and the US face very different problems—we are trying to pull people out of poverty while they are trying to prevent people from falling into poverty. America’s problem is more difficult—a $30,000 annual income is a lot of money, depending on which side you are coming from—and therefore, their politics will get more toxic before any healing can start.

America’s genius has been stealing the best people in the world, but my 12-year-old daughter came back from school saying that Trump winning was good for India because the smart Indians who left will have to come back and can then help build India. I think she is wrong, but after the visa order, I can’t be sure. The world is changing in ways that make dealing with India’s formal job emergency more difficult. And urgent.

This article was published in Indian Express

Does not recognise diversity: There is no such thing as India’s labour market and our states have very different levels of infrastructure, productivity, clustering, skills, urbanisation and costs of living. Kerala has now 9.5% Biharis since they exported the same amount to the Middle East; don’t export and import labour markets have different dynamics? India is a continent and the notion that one size of minimum wages will fit all is delusional.

Will supercharge informality: Ninety percent of India works informally because of various reasons but one of them is unreasonable labour laws. Wages are not paid by shareholders but customers and any attempt to raise minimum wages far ahead of productivity will raise informality. It is important to recognise that the stereotype of the Indian enterprise is wrong; when talking about employers most people think big companies, but India’s 63 million enterprises only translate to 17,000 companies with a paid up capital of more than R10 crores. Most enterprises in India do not have an office (12 million), most work from home (12 million), very few have tax registrations (8.5 million) and even fewer are limited liability companies (1 million).

Will punish youth: Global research studies suggest that artificially legislated minimum wages mostly punish the less skilled and young. Given that 10 lakh kids will be joining the labour force every month for 20 years, shouldn’t we facilitate rather than hinder their labour market entry? A national minimum wage will ensure that our demographic dividend becomes a demographic disaster.

Will retard Make-in-India: Only 11% of India works in manufacturing (the same as post-industrial US). The Make-in-India programme has wonderful goals to accelerate our farm to non-farm transition, but India does not face the same global manufacturing opportunity that China had in 1978 and will have to work harder. A rigged minimum wage will amplify and encourage capital substitution of labour.

Counter to co-operative federalism: This government has wonderfully decided to decentralise funds, functions and functionaries to the state governments recognising that India cannot be run from Delhi. Today of the 1,724 minimum wage categories for permanent employees, 1,679 are set by the state governments. Why take away this power of chief ministers for 29% of the labour force (the amount of our labour force in contract employment)? Twenty nine chief ministers matter more for job creation than 1 prime minister because labour markets are local and we should not undermine their powers.

Contract jobs are jobs for the 21st century; most jobs of this century will have a fixed start and end date. They are particularly attractive to first time time job seekers who are forced into informality as nobody wants to hire a fresher in a country where only 4% of our youth have had any kind of formal vocational training or skill training before joining the workforce. Contract jobs act as a stepping stone—50% of formal contract employees go onto permanent jobs within a year—by giving young people a chance to showcase their skills and learn on the job.

Minimum wage legislation is very important for a modern labour market. But minimum wage setting must be done transparently, consistently and carefully with an algorithm that is influenced by productivity, industry, skills, location and much else. And the notion that there must be different minimum wages for permanent and contract work does not recognise that India’s problem is not tenure but informality. Albert Einstein once said “Make things as simple as possible, not simpler”. A rigged national minimum wage is simplistic. More importantly, it is dangerous.

Non-fiscal interventions for formal employment

Allow low-wage employees (people with less than Rs 20,000 per month salary) to choose mandatory salary confiscation: Today, low-wage employees only receive 55% of their salary because 45% goes to statutory deductions like EPFO, EPS, ESI, LWF, EDLI, etc. Low-wage employees do not have a 45% savings rate and prefer informal employment, where haath waali (in-hand) salary equals chitthi waali (on-paper) salary;

Aadhaar for employers: The proposal to adopt PAN as the universal enterprise number across all central government agencies has been stuck because of a ministry of labour demand for an establishment number. This is irrational;

Adopt paperless, presence-less, and cashless labour law compliance.

This article was published in Financial Express

GST and demonetisation have real economic risks like skill hysteresis, demand deferring, and informal employment cratering. But thankfully, demonetisation’s biggest human risks are unrealised; there’s been no change in food prices at the 100 largest mandis or the 22,500 people that die every day. Report cards either way are premature; pundits must remember the wise “It’s too early to tell” quip of Chinese Premier Chou Enlai to Henry Kissinger’s question in 1970 about the impact of the French revolution of 1789. More importantly, the true risks of failure of big decisions in complex systems need to be underestimated; economist Albert Hirschman called this underestimation of failure the hiding hand necessary for entrepreneurship and progress.

Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard suggests the only way to improve air traffic safety is having plane crashes since everything known about air traffic safety is already built in. The country’s honourable patience with demonetisation not only has lessons for the GST transition but suggests three immediate policy actions; civil service reform, taxation recalibration, and lower regulatory cholesterol. The first is obvious.

Though necessary secrecy cramped style, some demonetisation pain came from government plumbing not keeping up with the cognitive, technical and specialised demands of India-scale. The generalist civil service needs rebooting with lateral entry, specialisation, performance management, adopting the early retirement army colonel threshold, etc. Second, the next budget should lower tax rates and raise the individual exemption limit to Rs 5 lakh. Finally, higher formal employment needs lower regulatory cholesterol; three low hanging fruit are a Universal Enterprise Number (instead of the 25 plus numbers every enterprise has today), going PPC (paperless, presenceless and cashless for all compliance), and salary choice (employee flexibility in mandatory salary confiscation of 45 per cent).

Globally, voters are forcing politicians to blur neat boundaries between the left and right and conservative and liberal. It was always simplistic to assume that business people don’t care about people and politicians hate fiscal discipline or can’t get re-elected once they do the right thing. Instead of misunderstanding Keynes’s quip “in the long run we are all dead” as foolishness in planting trees you won’t sit under, an entrepreneurial state knows the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago but the second best time is now. Indians must lose our sense of humour about the rule of law by moving from deals to rules; it’s economically corrosive for an Indian who follows a rule to feel she has missed a deal.

On my first trip to Patna this month a wise man said it has been Bihar’s misfortune that imaandaari (honesty) is equated with bewakoofi (stupidity). This isn’t a moral or spiritual insight; formal jobs are a rare — if not extinct — species in Bihar. The stories a society tells itself are unacknowledged legislation; India’s new story about formalisation, enforced laws, and lower costs of imaandaari will create new role models in business, politics and bureaucracy. Risk-taking could change the perception of government from “meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly” to a force for good. It’s the state that lays the foundation of equality; our biggest romance of policy was universal franchise at birth (previous democracies progressed through the landed, rich, and educated before reaching women).

Obviously, risks, like romance, can end badly and demonetisation could translate to political punishment in 2019. But it could translate to higher tax revenues for redistribution, a beginning of the end for informality, and a fairer India. A magnificent case for the romance of risk was Tagore’s quip that life should not be the infinite elongation of a straight line; the risks of GST and demonetisation are real but we won’t get a modern state until we have an entrepreneurial one.

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This article was published in Indian Express

2. Creating future workforce: building human capital is a long term investment. Like any investment, there are initial costs. For on-the-job training, these costs include the time devoted by the worker and co-workers to learning skills; and the cost of any equipment and material required to teach these skills. Like any investment, the returns to these expenditures occur in future periods.

3. Enhanced productivity: return on investment in human capital is measured by the increased productivity of the workers during subsequent periods of employment. Research suggests in the US that for a dollar spent on apprenticeships, return is as high as 3 dollars, accounted for by improved safety, elimination of rework and increased productivity of the craft worker.

4. Socio-economicupliftment: India ranks 105 in the human capital index released by World Economic Forum. The index measures countries ability to nurture, develop and deploy talent for economic growth. Apprenticeship is the best technique to do so. It teaches how to fish rather thanprovide fish. A society which is built on subsidy and grants can’t contribute to its own and nation’s development. The best way to grow the country is to enrich its human capital with craft to do, earn and create wealth.

World Bank Enterprise survey suggests that only 34% Indian employers engage into any formal training, where as in China it is as high as 80%. Comparison between China’s 20 million apprentices against ours less than 3 lac speaks volumes about our engagement with apprenticeships. Though Apprentices Act has undergone a massive amendment in December, 2014 from being policing to enabling employers to develop talent for themselves. Launch of NEEM scheme by MHRD has further made it conducive for employers to engage with traineeship with wider coverage of industries and functional areas. The choice employers need to make now is to sulk or to skill to bridge the gap.

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This article was published in World HR Diary

Do remember the following while writing your CV:

Your CV should ideally be under two pages. It should not become a booklet with multiple case studies, stories etc.
Understand the job role and company you are applying for and make changes to your CV accordingly. Customise your CV to fit in with the role

Information on your CV should be concise and to the point.
Never ever include false information in your CV. If you get caught during the interview or background verification stage, you may face dire consequences.

All information should be laid out clearly. Do not cramp it to put all possible information at one go. Chances of the latter being trashed is higher.
Make your CV modular. Use short paragraphs, bullet points and simple language to convey your message. No paragraphs please!
Be positive, put yourself confidently and highlight your strengths.
Pay attention to the font size and layout of your CV. You need to use the same font across the document, and do make use of highlighters, bold, italics etc to emphasis on the points you want the recruiter to focus.
If you are sending your CV by post or by e-mail, remember to send it along with a covering letter.

Remember, this document is a trailer and if you do get called for an interview, you will have all the time to detail your skills.

A great CV should relay to the interviewer that you are the right person for the job in few minutes. Having said that, a reviewer spends less than six seconds on your CV before he considers or trashes it.

So your CV should get straight to the point.

An authored article of Vikrant Pande (Provost, TeamLease Skills University) in DNA talks about how the teaching methodology in technical education is based on a faulty assumption.

A recent article talking of nearly 2 lakh engineers applying for 368 peon posts in UP state is a clear example of engineering colleges being on the wrong track. Since the IT revolution of the ’90s, engineering colleges were sitting pretty, getting 100 per cent placements and generally not bothered about what they taught. Today many of them are closing down due to the inability to place students. The less than industry-relevant curriculum is the effect, not the cause, of what ails colleges.

Teaching methodology is based on the faulty assumption that engineering is an academic discipline like chemistry or physics. In fact, engineering is applied science and is a profession, akin to medicine, law or chartered accountancy. The distinction between a profession and an academic discipline is crucial. When the Industrial Training Institutes (ITI) were formed, in the ’50s, the objective was to create a ‘trade’ school which conducted practicals more than theory. That was a useful, but hardly a comprehensive and professional education. The engineering colleges were supposed to fulfil the gap of offering ‘theoretical’ inputs. No curricular reforms will work until we start considering engineering as applied science. Today, the pedagogy in engineering colleges is only about teaching dozens of subjects with little or almost nil effort on practical exposure. Going back to the trade school paradigm would be a disaster. It is thus imperative to strike a new balance between pure theory and practical relevance.

Creating an entirely new set of universities like a skills universities offer many solutions to the problem. How is a skills university different from others? The basic DNA is about praying to the one god of employer. The curriculum is set by industry and not academicians. In engineering colleges we find that professors have no exposure to industry and they are far detached from real life applications of engineering. A skills university balances theory and practise. Theory in itself is not bad but focus on theory alone is disastrous. Law schools expect faculty members to be first-rate scholars; in fact, articles published in law reviews are often cited in trials. But these institutions also value professors’ ability to teach. Similarly, medical schools carry on advanced biological research, but most members of the teaching faculty are also practicing doctors. Our engineering colleges are full of professors with PhDs in their subjects. The regulator too mandates this without demanding for any industry experience.

The impact of this loss is clearly on employability of the graduates. Employers are frustrated that fresh engineering graduates lack practical exposure but have a vast and, most often, irrelevant theoretical knowledge. College professors have never seen the inside of a factory in their life!

The government needs to revamp distance education and allow local universities to offer massive open online courses. The regulator is stuck in a mindset that uses land, buildings and hardware as a proxy for intent. Hardware demonstrates the ability to spend money but is weakly correlated to quality or outcomes.

In India, we have to solve the impossible problem of getting things at the lowest cost, biggest scale and best quality. Getting two of three right in one institution is easy but government policy should encourage biodiversity; a number of genetically diverse but statistically independent tries that innovate in delivery models. IITs and IIMs have their place but they are a child of West with focus on quality for countries with small populations that grew rich before they grew old. We need an urgent solution to solve the problem of a million unemployed youth joining the market each month.

Let a hundred skills universities bloom.

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This article was published in DNA

Students at Christ University and New Horizon College of Engineering did not expect that they had to fly drone-like, remote-controlled inflated balloons. That was how USbased digital marketing fir m Epsilon kick-started its campus recruitment. “The intention was to bring an element of surprise,“ said Seema Padman, senior director (hum a n re s o u rc e s ) at E p s i l o n .“Campus hiring is all about brand awareness. Students are well-informed and choosy . So the first step is to get their attention.“

US-based technology firm ThoughtWorks has a code-pairing round where a candidate works with a panelist on a live project. “There’s much more to students than asking them to just write tests,“ said Shipra Shandilya, ThoughtWorks campus lead India.

Very few graduates have a clear line of vision on where they want to go after studying a four-year engineering course, according to Neeti Sharma, senior vice president (learning services) at staffing firm TeamLease. “A lot companies are now doing behavioural assessment to find out where a candidate is best suited to work. It’s also because quality of output is going down with so many engineering colleges that have come up.“

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This article was published in Economic Times