दृष्टिकोण – Indra's Viewpoint

Years ago, the children of my acquaintances used to ask my opinion about the preferred branch of engineering to be pursued. Though I graduated in mechanical engineering, I had dedicated myself for manufacturing. I enjoyed manufacturing, tried to learn it from all possible sources from working on the machine tools myself to learning through the literature of the equipment manufacturers, innovated ways to improve efficiency and did also contributed with many useful suggestions. Naturally, manufacturing engineering was my suggested option to those who queried. Perhaps, that was the reason I asked even Rakesh, my eldest son to pursue manufacturing science and technology in IIT, Kharagpur and Industrial Engineering in Purdue University, US. However, very soon I realized my mistake. I might have spent my whole life in and around manufacturing, but India had failed to take a lead in manufacturing sector. Manufacturing sector hardly gave good salary and recognition to its engineers. Interestingly though, in our course of mechanical engineering at IIT, Kharagpur, out of six specializations in final year, production engineering was considered the best and was reserved for the best fifteen or twenty students based on the performance of third year examination. I could get into machine design only.

Today, many engineering colleges including IITs provide options of graduating in manufacturing/production engineering/technology and have even post-graduate education facilities. But in reality, hardly any one on own, prefers to get into manufacturing engineering. Many a times it appears, for the present generation, the only branch of engineering of worth is computer related ones, hardware, software, networking, Information Technology, and many more with high sounding nomenclature. Tata Sons director Jamshed Irani notes, “We no longer have a surfeit of electronic, electrical, mechanical, metallurgical engineers.” Even those from other streams join IT sector, and the sector uses them effectively after certain training. Manufacturing sector that hardly appreciates the graduate degree in manufacturing engineering either employs mechanical or manufacturing engineers from the lot discarded by the top companies of other sectors, or select diploma holders from polytechnics, if engineers. As admitted by the chairman of NMCC, Krishnamurthy: “At the shopfloor level as well as at the entry levels in engineering departments relating to manufacturing, a vast number of positions are manned by diploma holders from polytechnics.”

While the industry reports rising growth of manufacturing sector, the education system has hardly created capacity to meet the demand at various levels. Further, those who come out of the undergraduate and graduate courses are hardly skilled enough to contribute effectively to the industry. Unfortunately, none of the engineering courses can provide students that can straight be put to work. Manufacturing demands skill that can be learnt only on shop floor. The problem requires a lot of discussions and decisions to bring about some basic changes in education system at all levels. It is unfortunate that the present education system just doesn’t churn out skilled manpower.

Unfortunately, only a meager percent (varying between 15 to 25%) of the 4,50,000 engineering graduates passing out every year are employable. “Most jobs require skills, the products of the education system have only knowledge. There’s a mismatch between what the system is producing and what the market needs.”

Even in diploma courses, the condition is equally grim. Interestingly, right in his first budget in 2004, the Finance Minister announced upgradation of all industrial training institutes under one key initiative of public-private plan to centres of excellence. The project had a hesitant start, and usual delays were expected particularly because of the state governments. CII was to play a major role, but it failed. However, of late, according to CII, its members have adopted 170 ITIs, and about a 100 companies are now working with ITIs. However, India requires at least thousands of the trade schools to meet the requirements of manufacturing sector if it grows by 12 to 15 % as expected. As per an estimate that was admitted by Union labour minister Oscar Fernandes, around 12.8 million join the labour force every year, but India has infrastructure to train only 2.5 million.

Today the traditionally conservative manufacturing sector is offering comparatively better compensation packages. As per Watson Wyatt Worldwide, “This year, the manufacturing and engineering industry is expected to offer salary increases of 16 per cent, when it’s expected to be 15 per cent from IT, ITeS and bpo, and 13.5 per cent from insurance.”

Beside the salary increases, some companies are fine-tuning their employment policies to make manufacturing jobs more attractive. Almost all large engineering companies prefer to employ the graduates from tier II engineering colleges, and train them in-house. Manufacturing sector has started recruiting in excess to build a talent pool as per its expansion plans.

However, a severe talent crunch is impacting the productivity of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that can’t afford so high a salary, badly. According to Assocham, attrition rates as high as 40 per cent are hurting SMEs, forcing them to cut manufacturing output to Rs 12 lakh crore in 2006-07 from Rs 14 lakh crore the previous year. According to deputy director-general, CII. “Manufacturing needs 12 million people. What we have now is just one-tenth of that.”

Technical education requires a total overhaul. Every student coming out of school after 10-12 years of education must acquire skill at least in one trade beside the operating and using of computers.

Community must use its really skilled persons, though not formally qualified to train youngsters. Some certifying agencies must be allowed to issue licenses or certificates.

While a large number of trade schools must be established in private and/ or public sectors, the existing Industrial Training Institutes must be expanded many times and given a honourable status. All engineering colleges must have a tie up with manufacturing units. All students and teachers must understand the practical requirements of the shop floor, and change the curricula accordingly.

Internet and virtual training facilities available must be used extensively. Even the services of experienced retired persons from the manufacturing sector must be sought to meet the requirements.

India must not miss the bus this time.

As reported, ‘from under the ruins of an ancient fort on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar, archaeologists have dug out the remains of a 2,500-year-old “huge” city which they believe was bigger than classical Athens.’ Remnants include 18 pillars that were part of a gigantic structure, probably used for public gatherings, household pottery and terracotta ornaments. The polished potteries even have ownership marks on them. It was Sishupalgarh once ruled by the Kalinga kings. ”The city had four gateways and could have housed up to 25,000 people. Even classical Athens had only 10,000 people.”

It is interesting the excavation team consisted of Monica L Smith, head archaeologist from the University of California and R K Mohanty from Deccan College, Pune beside some members from the Archaeological Survey of India.

It appears ASI has limited fund and human resources. One hardly hears much about its works. Most of the excavations and its findings are from Raj days. Britishers were more interested in the history of this ancient land. The governments thereafter perhaps took hardly any interest in the ruins scattered over the country that can reveal many mysteries and myths about India’s glorious past. Perhaps one of the reasons was the policy of secularism that prohibits glorifying the country’s past. Look at the members of the team. The head from the University of California gets interested into the excavations but not the ones of Indian universities. I got pained to visit the Kumbhrar at Patna last year, when I found all the huge pillars of a hall of ancient Patliputra buried by the ASI or the government under sand. ASI has hardly done any work to discover out any significant sites near around Patna from Asokan period. Perhaps India lacks the archeologists with a missionary zeal in this era of materialism.

If the place would have been in a developed country, perhaps by now an archeological park would have come up earning revenues in millions and providing employments to thousand.

And I feel to quote the correspondent of Telegraph about Shisupalgarh. “If one asks what does Bhubaneswar have in common with archaeological sites such as Giza, Tikal and Lepcis Magna, the answer would be Sishupalgarh, located 12km from the capital, the remains of an ancient city containing evidence of a life both urban and economically strong.”

I visited Bhubaneswar many years ago and roamed in Udaigiri and Khandgiri. I wish I could go again. Whenever, I think of Kalinga War and Ashoka I get an unknown thrill and excitement.

Read Nayanjot Lahiri ‘ What lies beneath?’

‘Outlook’, February 4, issue has a cover story ‘Listening to Grasshoppers- Genocide, Denial and Celebration’ by Arundhati Roy. It is an abridged version of her lecture delivered in Istanbul on January 18, 2008.
As usual, I got the copy of ‘Outlook’ from my advocate neighbour, Y P Singh. After going through, I had returned it. But Mr. Singh came back again with the magazine and a manuscript that he wrote for the editor on Arundhati’s article. He is basically a fan of Arundhati and likes her style and particularly well-research contents that she incorporates well in all of her writings. However, he had not liked her this view in this article: “It was in 1989, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the Government of India turned in its membership of the Non-Aligned Movement and signed up for membership of the Completely Aligned, often referring to itself as the ‘natural ally’ of Israel and the United States. (They have at least this one thing in common-all three are engaged in overt, neo-colonial military occupations: India in Kashmir, Israel in Palestine, the US in Iraq.)”

For the editor, Mr. Singh wrote,

“On page 54, she writes that India is engaged in an overt neocolonial military occupation in Kashmir and she has compared India with USA’s role in Iraq and Israel’s handling of Palestinian people. This observation is recklessly erroneous and objectionable. She has ignored the facts, which have taken place in near enough past that are still quite fresh in the mind of many Indians. The State of J&K was a part of Ranjit Singh’s empire. Later on, Dogras ruled it with Hindus and Muslims living there peacefully. In 1947, when the Muslim intruders aided by Pakistan invaded it, India sent her army in Kashmir to save it from them on request of the then King Hari Singh after he had signed a treaty of accession to India. But the Muslim intruders and militants from Pakistan kept on entering and creating trouble in the state and the situation forced the Kashmiri pundits to leave their homes and hearths. Since then the pundits are living in refugee camps of India under miserable conditions. Is this action of India neocolonial? In her account of genocides, why is she silent about the atrocities committed by the Muslims in Mediaeval Period? Why is she silent about the atrocities met out to Parsees so that they had to take asylum in India?”

Mr. Singh wanted me to look into his writing and give my views.

I am not a fan of Arundhati. Arundhati came into eminence with her Booker prize winning novel. Thereafter, I don’t remember if she has written any more novels. However, she had become celebrity and I found her joining the ever-aggrieved activists sometimes even Medha Patkar. She has also written on developmental projects and she feels the country policy makers and entrepreneurs would have taken the country into stone age rather than doing something to compete with other developed and developing nations and to reduce the poverty of the masses that was inherited by the country because of centuries of slavery and rules by foreigners.

Arundhati must provide some alternative models for the poor and deprived of the country that can improve their living conditions. Instead, for Arundhati every one is either fascists or sycophants of industrialists or politicians, be it Rattan Tata or Mukesh Ambani or Shahrukh Khan or Ram Chndra Guha. Arundhati must have some reasons for so great a negativity in her thinking that comes out clearly in her cover story. Here is some portion of her story for you to judge.

I use the word Genocide advisedly, and in keeping with its definition contained in Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In the state of Gujarat, there was genocide against the Muslim community in 2002. The genocide began as collective punishment for an unsolved crime-the burning of a railway coach in which 53 Hindu pilgrims were burned to death. In a carefully planned orgy of supposed retaliation, 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in broad daylight by squads of armed killers, organised by fascist militias, and backed by the Gujarat government and the administration of the day. Muslim women were gang-raped and burned alive. Muslim shops, Muslim businesses and Muslim shrines and mosques were systematically destroyed. Some 1,50,000 people were driven from their homes.

Even today, many of them live in ghettos-some built on garbage heaps-with no water supply, no drainage, no streetlights, no healthcare. They live as second-class citizens, boycotted socially and economically. Meanwhile, the killers, police as well as civilian, have been embraced, rewarded, promoted. This state of affairs is now considered ‘normal’. To seal the ‘normality’, in 2004, both Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani, India’s leading industrialists, publicly pronounced Gujarat a dream destination for finance capital.

In Gujarat, the genocide has been brazenly celebrated as the epitome of Gujarati pride, Hindu-ness, even Indian-ness. The helmsman, Narendra Modi, has become a folk hero, called in by the BJP to campaign on its behalf in other Indian states.
Babu Bajrangi, one of the major lynchpins of the Gujarat genocide, recorded on camera in the sting operation mounted by Tehelka a few months ago:

We didn’t spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire…hacked, burned, set on fire…we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don’t want to be cremated, they’re afraid of it…. I have just one last wish…let me be sentenced to death…I don’t care if I’m hanged…just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs of these people stay…I will finish them off…let a few more of them die…at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die.

I hardly need to say that Babu Bajrangi had the blessings of Narendra Modi, the protection of the police, and the love of his people.

Is it reasonable to worry about whether a country that is poised on the threshold of “progress” is also poised on the threshold of genocide? Could the India being celebrated all over the world, as a miracle of progress and democracy, possibly be poised on the verge of committing genocide?

You must read the whole story through the link and yourself judge her real input as representative of India. Is it something those foreigners whom we find taking photographs of all odd things such as filths and beggars in India for the domestic consumption? Why should Arundhati vomit so many of her confusingly complex views to her listeners in Istanbul about the India that people all over the world have started respecting? Is it not an act of treachery or treason?

My primary education was very much non-traditional. It got divided between my village school and Birlapur, a small factory town near Kolkata. Fortunately, I didn’t undergo the rigour of rote learning; particularly of tables that were the way the teachers in the rural India wished the best of his pupils to do. Many in rural schools could repeat the table up to 30 or more. Some memorized even multiplication table of fractions such as ¼, 1/3, 1/5, and 3/4. Beside the table, they could very easily, almost mentally, solve some arithmetical problems of day- to-day use such as one used to calculate the price of grain sold to the rural traders at some odd rates. However, I had to use my slow systematic way. My mother used to get surprised why I couldn’t do that as the traders could do.

While in rural school, I got interested in Hindi poems. I was very good in Antachhari. I went for regular schooling at Birlapur. I had to resort to some rote learning to answer the questions asked in those days. For many subjects, it was essential. I remember some of the friends used to memorize even essays that were expected to be asked in examinations. However, I tried to write the answers on my own. I can say it varied from individual to individual. At least in those days for subjective questions, it was not possible to memorize all.

Today I hardly remember anything that I studied in my school and colleges. But I get amazed when my friend Mr. Singh who is advocate by profession recites poems of many poets.

F. Max Muller in his a ‘must-read’ wonderful book ‘India: what can it teach us?’ refers to India’s education system as documented by the Chinese visitor I-tsing. ‘Vedas, containing 100,000 verses…are handed down from mouth to mouth, not written on paper. There are in every generation some intelligent Brahmans who can recite those 100,000 verses… I myself saw such men.’ For mastery of Sanskrit, the education system emphasized on rote learning. Was it deficient in any way? Perhaps, Indians still take pleasure in that system.

Chidanand Rajghatta in his Sunday column writes on the subject in ‘Banking on memory’:

Indian education typically involves teaching by repetition. Learning by heart, cramming, mugging is some of the terms we use for memorization. To this day I can recite reams of Shakespeare, sundry shlokas and mantras, several laws of physics, and multiplication tables deep into double digits

In contrast, American kids are less into learning by rote or trivia, although one does come across the oddball who can reel off the 1969 Mets V Orioles World Series scores. My friend Adam cares diddly squat about Boyle’s Law or the Bible, but he gutted his entire bathroom down to pot and plumbing, tub and tiling, and rebuilt it himself for less than $5,000 (half of what a contractor would have charged). Meantime, I blew a gasket paying $80 to get my lawnmower fixed ($56 labour, $24 parts), thanks to an education system that didn’t allow me to get my hands dirty.

But, it turns out that there is something to be said for our desi system of bending our brains rather than our backs, beyond paraphrasing a successful Indian who insisted he wouldn’t bother about paying $56 an hour if he could bill $500 an hour.

Recent reports say there is now a growing craze in Japan for Indian style education. The few Indian schools in Japan are reporting a surge of application from locals. Bookstores are filled with titles like Extreme Indian Arithmetic Drills and The Unknown Secrets of the Indians. And newspaper reports speak with awe about how Indian children memorise multiplication tables far beyond nine times nine, the standard for young elementary students in Japan.

I don’t know if the Japanese are doing the right.

Indians did develop some wonderful knowledge. Last Monday, Mrs. Bharatiya announcement after our kirtan session at Nagpals’ residence surprised me. A teacher was going to take a short course on Vedic Mathematics for four days 2 hours a day in evening for Rs 1000 as course fee. I had a chance of learning a little of it. It is a unique short cut method to do many big numerical without the help of a calculator (Try by going to the link).

I sometimes wonder why should any system be considered better. Perhaps each system has some merit. The education must serve the purpose- such as improving employability. It must inculcate the interest in keeping on furthering the knowledge, and in innovating in every sphere where we work. If it is successful in doing that, it is the right system. In short, the education system must make a student interested in at least o