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| Photo Source : UNDP |
Towards the goal of
achieving social changes mainly by skilling poor people has been a major thrust
of many of our nation builders in India especially from Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi to Rajiv Gandhi, and others. Indeed, all of them had very strong
perspective thoughts on skilling poor people that play greater differences in
their life in society. An attempt has been made in this article to bring the
thoughts of the two great sons of India whose visions are eternal in some ways
at least in skilling people.
The conventional wisdom
was that if anyone is able to understand, speak and write about something
simple form in a language becomes literate in society. But the twenty-first
century wisdom of literate or skilled human resource has become quite different
as the world of science and technology has changed steadily. What is quite
interesting is that the nation builders who had views on skilling poor people
which are of the twenty-first century perspective.
The father of the
nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had expressed number of times through his
perspective writings about the importance of skilling poor people for highly
productive works in employment. Gandhi said that “Literacy is not the end of
education nor even the beginning. It is only one of the means whereby man and
woman can be educated. Literacy in itself is no education. I would therefore
begin the child’s education by teaching it a useful handicraft and enabling it
to pro- duce from the moment it begins its training (1948).”
With regard to the
skilling of villagers, Gandhi said, “Without the basic training the villagers
are being starved for education (Harijan, 28-4-1946)”. He further said that we
need to “develop such a high degree of skill that articles prepared by them
should command a ready market outside. When our villages are fully developed
there will be no dearth in them of men with a high degree of skill and artistic
talent. There will be village poets, village artists, village architects,
linguists and research workers (Harijan, 10-11-1946)”.
In fact, Gandhi’s
thoughts on skilling people were universal and much beyond the improving of
villages. He said that “A mason can build a village house, but it requires an
engineer to plan and build a big building or a big dam. Much more talent,
knowledge, application and research are required to improve the village
implements than to build a bridge on the Ganga. When we are able to attract
people of this type by our renunciation and methodical research, we will be
able to make rapid far-reaching progress, not till then (Khadi Jagat, 25-7-1941)”.
Similarly, Rajiv Gandhi
was one of early Indian politicians to talk about the fruits of India’s demographic
dividend from the perspective of the twenty-first century. Indeed, he foresaw
the imperatives of skilling poor and young people and institutionalizing the
training system. Speaking in 1988, he said, "we are one of the world's
oldest civilizations and one of the youngest nations. Our country's demographic
profile has undergone a major revolution. Now, there is a preponderance of
youth. This is a decisive factor in determining our nation's destiny." He also quite vividly envisaged that “Training
and education do not end when you leave college. It is a continuing process.
You keep learning as you keep working.”
Currently India is
striving for building up of mass manufacturing hubs in the country with the
focus of establishing large infrastructure development to support economic
activities of production and services. It is very much pertinent to remember
what Rajiv Gandhi said two decades ago about skilling people for the revolution
of information and communication technology.
He had said that “To
get electronics really moving in India, we have to go down to the other end of
the chain. We are mostly talking about manufacturing and selling. We have to go
to the other end and produce enough people who will be able to deal with the
equipment that you are about to produce, which means a turn-around in our
education system. We need many more institutes such as the ITIs, but oriented
and run in a much more professional manner, oriented towards more modern fields
of technology. We need to really develop a mentality in our people of using
modem methods.”
In fact, during the
last ten years (2004-2014) the UPA government’s initiatives on skill
development were actually to implement the Rajiv’s visions of modernizing the
Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) into a Centre’s of Excellences. There was
1,896 government ITIs in the country when the UPA took over in 2004-05. Two
schemes (upgradation of 100 government ITIs through Domestic Funding and
upgradation of 400 government ITIs with World Bank Funding) were implemented to
upgrade the existing government ITIs into Centre’s of Excellences. Remaining 1,396
government ITIs were undertaken part of the scheme called Upgradation of 1,396
government ITIs into Public Private Partnership Mode for converting them into
CoEs. All of them were achieved by 2014 with greater improvements in the
skilling systems in the country.
References
1.
Collected
Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume 80: Dec 28, 1940 - Aug 17, 1941
2.
Rajiv
Gandhi’s Speech on “Electronics for Progress”,
3.
Foundation
Day Lecture by the President of India, Smt. Pratibha Devisingh Patil at the
Rajiv Gandhi National Institute of Youth Development, Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu,
01-September-2007 http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx
4.
Rajiv
Gandhi’s Speech on Revamping the Educational System
B.Chandrasekaran
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