Today, if you order a coffee in any of the premium coffee shops, you’ll find it in a cup with some words of caution on it, stating that the item is hot. It all started with the famous Stella Liebeck and McDonald’s lawsuit. In 1992, Stella Liebeck of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was in the passenger seat of her grandson’s car, when she ordered a coffee at a local McDonalds’ drive-through. Liebeck held the cup between her legs and while removing the lid, the coffee spilled on her leg, causing a severe burn injury. To claim the amount that she had to spend for her treatment, Stella Lieback filed a lawsuit that compelled McDonald’s to pay her a hefty amount as settlement.

While the justification of such a case can be debated, to an Indian this is no more than a bedtime story. You’ll hardly come across an Indian who can even imagine going to court for such lapses in the day to day life — train not reaching on time, exam results delayed, cable connection getting disrupted without notice, nursing staff not replacing the saline bottle on time, so on and so forth. Since Independence, we Indians have been ‘ok’ with things the way we got them. Though with globalisation, our consciousness has improved, our compromising attitude towards quality — both at the delivery and the receiving end — leaves us in a world of mediocrity.

If we really dream that India takes the driver’s seat and steers the world economy in the near future, we cannot afford to have an ocean of talent fenced off under-utilised, doomed to travel a road leading nowhere.

There are surely some exceptions discretely available. In the Airports Council International's Airport Service Quality survey 2016, the Hyderabad International Airport grabbed the first position in the 5-15 million passengers per annum (MPPA) category. While this is no mean achievement, one must admit that this is something of an exception resulting from a huge amount of concentrated effort, which doesn’t really bespeak the quality of other services in our day to day life. The people in India see the ability to tolerate undesired service lapses as a virtue of character. Which would have been alright had we not looked forward and welcomed the supernatural age of digital intelligence we’re about to witness strongly. With robotics and machine-learning creeping in, the quality of services associated with the objects of our use will have a critical role in determining the quality of our life. Leave aside driver-less cars or robot-led surgeries, just recall how disastrous your day becomes if your mobile connection gets disrupted multiple times while you’re in the middle of some important discussion or the browser throbber keeps rotating and you’re unable to download a report before entering into a meeting. Even thinking such instances to be flawless today is a bad joke.

Today, it is imperative for every Indian to take responsibility with enough administrative backup and determine 'what' standards we accept and 'what not' in every piece of our life. And this starts at the school level, where our approach to life gets moulded.

Teach the Teachers

Where is the need to send your child to school when every single subject at every level can be taught online at home? One common answer makes me picture every school fundamentally as a crèche, where children irrespective of their age stay engaged in some kind of activity so that their parents can be at their respective workplaces without worrying much about them.

In our perennial educational and social structure, we don’t value a knowledge worker, who doesn’t hold certification as per our defined standards — there’s no place for college dropouts in India, period. The regimented structure of Indian education system, starting from schools, makes education seemingly distressful by closing the doors of possibilities of millions of young minds while keeping them engaged for six hours a day for some ten crucial years. It follows a stereotyped method of learning that fundamentally treats every child as equal, while, essentially they’re different, very different.

Eminent educationalist and ex-director of NCERT Professor Krishna Kumar, in his book What is worth Teaching?, argues “The basic character of our examination system has not changed to this day. Examinations continue to focus on the capacities to memorise and reproduce... Even the most imaginative teachers, few as they are, find it hard not to succumb sooner or later to the demand that they should teach for the examinations.” On another occasion, he states: “Pressure to learn faster and to outshine others kills all intrinsic motivation to learn. What remains is that urge to make the teachers and parents feel happy and proud of you. Intellectually, most children studying in our prestigious city schools are burned out by the end of the primary grades.”

We’ve to ask ourselves whether we’re equipped to deal with children of the current generation — a definitely more evolved iteration of our species — at levels of their understanding, thought process and behaviour. Curriculum design, methodology of teaching and process of evaluation become secondary if we’re fundamentally not in alignment with the generation we are dealing with — we start trying to teach them things, being clueless about their learning curve, and evaluate them on a merit-based model designed that we’ve been following for decades.

A report published by Aspiring Minds, a talent assessment company, earlier this year, highlights the alarming incompatibility between the knowledge/ability of engineering graduates and the required industry-specific skills, especially in the software development space including technology jobs in startups. As published in The Hindu Business Line, the study further mentions, “while more than 60 percent candidates (from IT related branches), cannot even write code that compiles, only 1.4 percent can write functionally correct and efficient code.”

On the contrary, countries across the globe are introducing Computer Programming at early school levels. Early 2012 Estonia, the birthplace of Skype, launched a pilot programme, ProgeTiiger, to teach programming to all students from grades 1 to 12. The United Kingdom was one of the first countries to mandate computer programming in primary and secondary schools in their revised curriculum since 2014. “If you teach computing and do it right, you can help children develop their learning in literacy and numeracy,” says Bill Mitchell, director of education at BCS (British Computer Society). According to him, introduction to algorithmic thinking at an early age gets them associated with the ‘science behind thinking’, which is a highly valuable asset that helps in dealing with people or working with a team in later stages of life.

Our real challenge remains at the root — the first ten years of education in schools. One common refrain that I find among parents is that they think going to school is essential for making a child open up and mix with people. While this is true to some extent, in spite of the schooling experience we find more and more nuclear families and isolated self-centred individuals, wrapping up the society, which often reasonably or not, questions their upbringing. Do our children take home more vices than virtues from their environment in school?

The world is moving towards cloud-based education. Can India take a bold step in advocating an open learning environment where non-institutional learning gets equal acceptance both in education an employment, public and private alike? Else, in the Google age, where information is in abundance, it’s pertinent to assess the value the teachers in classrooms are bringing to the table. A counter to this might be — ‘while Google may have answers to your questions, it doesn’t teach what to ask.’ But do we have those imaginative teachers who can really teach ‘questioning’? Because, when a child shifts from ‘listening to questions’ to ‘asking the relevant question’, it’s that eureka moment, when everything changes. To make this to be true, we need teachers with high CQ (Creative Quotient) to be present in every classroom in India.

I’m rather more intrigued by what’s happening in slum schools run by NGOs. There are some exceptional success stories where the approach has been quite dynamic. They’ve been successful in bringing enthusiastic volunteers and educators from different parts of the country and abroad while systematically applying modern teaching methodologies to open the minds of their students. All these bring a fresh breath of air in a child’s education — like in sports, where foreign coaches are brought in to gain fresh perspectives and apply new training methodologies. Why can’t we do this in our education system?

Over the last two decades, there have been so many books and videos published that have brought in a fresh perspective to the understanding of the 'Human Mind,' be it that of a child or an adult — throwing light on ‘how people contemplate, learn and excel’. All such resources have brought in much of a change the way we look at our kids or individuals as a whole, globally. There are books from Barbara Oakley, Carol Dweck, Paul Tough, Adam Grant, Dave Burgess to name a few. How open are our teachers to learn? A teacher needs to constantly upgrade himself or herself, the way a doctor does. The difference is, if a doctor doesn’t, he may go out of business, for a teacher, nobody is checking.

The bottom-line is: we need to have extensive Teachers’ training-and-upgrade programmes at regular intervals in our education system, on a mandatory basis. There will be challenges — scarcity of teachers, things becoming worse or teachers revolting — but these are temporary. None of these challenges give us reason to allow the fundamental to go unrepaired. It’s the next-gen Indians that we’re liable to prepare. The bigger question then remains, ‘Who will train the trainers?’ Where are those educationalists or super teachers, and how many in number? Or do we hire foreign coaches for that? Dear teachers, please DIY (Do it yourself). Refer to books, videos, online courses and apply the things that you learn. It’s your child who’s suffering otherwise. While the country is obsessed with the buzz-word ‘Make in India,’ why don’t you take up the initiative of ‘Making Indians?’

The Power of 500 Million

With fellowships and newly launched schemes like VAJRA (Visiting Advanced Joint Research) Faculty, India is trying to pull back it’s moved out talents, transforming ‘brain-drain’ to ‘brain-gain’. While the Indian government is trying to keep the incentive for these individuals attractive, it’s too early to comment on the success of such initiatives as India struggles to provide the desired infrastructure and opportunity in their specific areas of work. While nearly 1 million young Indians have been working in the United States, there are close to half a billion in our homeland, a potential we need to recognise and address well if we really wish to reap the demographic dividend of our country.

In its 2017 Global Talent Trends Study, Mercer, a leading global consulting firm, states, “more than 50% of young Indians plan to quit their current jobs in the next 12 months. Even employees not planning to leave their current roles feel less "energized" in terms of being themselves at work and are therefore less likely to thrive in a collaborative and innovative workplace." To mitigate stress, young Indians are indulging in aberrant lifestyles which, according to medical experts, are leading to heart-related disorders awfully common in the age just after 30. A recent Hindustan Times Youth Survey reveals that about 50% of its respondents worry about a secure future. According to the latest data from Optum — a top provider of EAP (Employee Assistance Program) solutions to corporates, as high as 46% of the workforce in organisations in India suffer from stress. According to HT, Optum took a sample size of 200,000 employees, over 30 large employers during the first quarter of 2016 to do the assessment.

While an average prime-age worker in the United States works about 35 to 40 hours a week, in India the corresponding number is twice that. For a working Indian, this leaves no time for cultivating any entrepreneurial activity or having meaningful engagement with family. The irony is, India produces around 1.5 million engineers every year, which is more than five times that of the United States and one of the largest in the world, but when it comes to wages, an average Indian engineer earns less than a tenth of an engineer in the U.S. The anomaly between the dream that a young Indian carries while joining a company and the reality they discover by and by drives most young campus recruits crazy in the initial years of their job. Most of these companies, irrespective of their size, put profit as the fundamental driver for business, hence putting unstructured pressure on employees to meet targets with a narrowed timeline. For an average employee, this leaves no room for experimentation, eating out the excitement around learning new things. The mundane work culture added to stress is leading a large number of agile young minds to ‘deep frustration’.

We need to make strong commitments on nurturing a healthy work-environment across companies and opening doors with organised possibilities, not only in science and technology, but in every field of work, including that of sports, entertainment, and other creative endeavours. If we really dream that India takes the driver’s seat and steer the world economy in the near future, we cannot afford to have an ocean of talent fenced off under-utilised, doomed to travel a road leading nowhere.

(This is the second piece in a two-part series that seeks to explore how India can achieve its true potential and progress. Give the first part, titled 'How India can achieve true progress and compete globally' a read too.)