God!! I miss writing. It’s been so long and I kept pressing myself to be proactive enough to write one blog and finally I am. Anyway the thought occurred to me on a chilly North Indian winter morning because I heard a lot of fellow compatriots conversing on the imminent talent crisis in India. Seemed like a social movement emanating right inside the technology utopia to go to the crux of the issue to unravel the answer. Bruno would have felt the same when he tried to unravel the mysteries of that space. But come to think of it and it’s something which people have been talking for 3 decades now. Why do we have a talent crunch in a country of 1.5 B folks with so many students graduating every year. There are different narratives I come to hear every now and then. For the sake of simplicity, let’s confine our discussion to only engineering students. Why is it that it’s so difficult for startups or biggies to find engineers who are good at technical skills. Isn’t that the whole purpose of doing engineering? Is it also the academia which needs to be blamed? Can we also blame the Indian corporate for such an anomaly? Or if we don’t find the culprit then we blame the entire education system for such a misdeed? We really don’t want to do the blame game. instead let’s first figure out what led to this talent crisis.

If you look at the talent crisis in India especially in engineering, you would find that its primarily because either the selection processes employed by companies are faulty or the students lack the perspective and knowledge to work as engineers. But before we even go there, take a look at our education system. We have close to 14 years of education every Indian student has to go through if I include 2 years of Nursery/Pre Nursery/Kindergarten. In these 14 years, the sole focus is on scoring more marks to be deemed successful. The method of learning is rote memorisation devoid of an actual understanding of what is being taught. I mean students are taught how to calculate the area of a circle by multiplying the square of radius with pi(3.142) but what is pi and why do we multiply it by the square of radius is something no one will ever teach. So most students till they appear for their class 10th board exams or class 12th board exams aren’t really aware of the actual mechanisms employed by mathematicians to solve a problem. They merely memorise formulae and put values in them to compute something which fetches them 5 or 10 marks. But the kid loses out on actually understanding the purpose behind learning be it algebra, mensuration, calculus, number theory, mathematical induction or almost anything.

Add to it the singular fact that the Macaulian education system which wanted to create the Brown Sahibs or a class of Indian bureaucrats who would be at the Queen’s service without questioning the system during pre independence was borrowed by the Indian Education system post independence. A slight glimpse into the history of mass education in India would have shown that before the introduction of the three tier eduction system by Lord Macaulay, Indian education seemed to be scientific in nature, establishing mechanisms for questioning beliefs and discarding theories if they were devoid of facts. The British created a system where a certain section of the society belonging to the upper echelons could be educated in subjects that had absolutely no usage in their jobs. They decimated the entire structure of asking questions as they didn’t want folks to be borne with an inquisitive mind and start questioning the system for fear of mutiny. What is funny is that the anglo Indian missionaries took India’s original education system with them back to Britain to bring forth mass education. Today over the last 74 years we have created a lacklustre or purposeless education system that thrives on vanilla data points as marks or grades to segregate people. In other words it’s not any different from the British strategy of dividing the social utopia to enforce control. Today the education system doesn’t encourage original thinking, creativity, innovation or invention and is completely transformed into a commodity. The endpoint of the entire educational journey is a commodity called a certificate that has the right to decide a person’s future. The education system does not prompt a person to win the race but creates another purposeless bot. It does not even let a student identify what he loves to do and what his interests are. The fight for grades or marks becomes the only purpose in a student’s life. When I was in school, I used to write these comics out of ideas I had about new superheroes but every time I was caught writing one, I was punished. Complains were made to my parents about how I write comics instead of focusing on studies. The teachers inadvertently decimated my creative growth right there.

So after 14 years of meaningless education, the student or more specifically the Indian student has no clue what to do because as much as I can remember, no one really told the kids what’s gonna be good for them based on their interests but everyone had a quasi role model to follow which could be a certain Sharma ji’s son who did engineering and got a great job paying North of 6 lakhs. That’s been the primordial social model that Indian parents have religiously followed over the past few decades. Add to it the fact that the two most important subjects that students would need in their practical life like money and human psychology are never taught. So a student doesn’t realise his purpose or true calling even after spending 14 years studying subjects that aren’t helpful at all. He has no clue what he likes or not. He is just there to feed the needs of the educational system which segregates students and puts them into various buckets instead of focusing on their cognitive and emotional development. Most of these kids don’t have zero clue how to solve real world problems. Then at the height of their cluelessness when they are at the verge of completing their boards then using pattern recognition techniques, they are made to crack unnecessary entrance exams to opt for engineering or management degrees on the singular su