Are we Grooming Talents for Future Leaders?

Asoke K Laha, President & CEO of Interra Information Technologies
 

The other day I was privy to a conversation among an assortment of people of all ages regarding the scale and range of digital disruptions in India. I thought that the older people would be airing their concerns about the fast uptake of digital revolution in India. One of the topics they had discussed included how soon the check system in India would be replaced by a digital architecture, which I thought might not be a palatable proposition for them, assuming that the operation of the digital devices might not be easy to be picked up by them.  Contrary to my expectation, they  were ardent supporters of the emerging digital architecture. 

The reason they articulated,  sounded logical when they tendered their explanations laced with experience. One  said that he faced quite often the problem of mismatch between the signature he had shared with the bank, while he opened the bank account years ago and what it is now. Even with a minor variation in the signature, the check gets returned. That happens quite often even while he changes the signature periodically  by visiting the branches.   On the other hand, a  digital transaction cannot go wrong on those counts.   I thought it was a very logical argument.

But what shocked me more was the assertion of the youngsters to continue with the check system or at least run it parallel with the digital platforms. The reasons were equally interesting and more so intriguing. They, I suspect, at least a few, could be computer professionals. Then their problems will not be lack of knowledge in understanding the operations. It could be something more than that. I tried to infer what could be the reasons? Could it be the feeling that anything that is stored digitally can be hacked or accessed by other parties? Or could it be an aversion that they are developing against the digital platforms, search engines  or a generic feeling that  nothing can be kept unto them in digital format.  

I did not probe further since as a technocrat and an employer in the ICT domain, I shudder to think that youngsters are developing dislike for the digital platforms.  I believe that is the key catalyst for bringing about positive changes in human civilization at least in the next few decades till a new platform, more powerful than this, is invented, nurtured and perfected. I do not know when that would happen; how it would happen and the prospects and challenges that dispensation would bring to human civilization.

However hard I thought of banishing from mind the conversation that I was privy to, I could not do so. It used to come to my mind and engage my thought process. Why do those seemingly bright professionals develop dislike for digital platforms?

I always feel that faith in oneself is the greatest asset. Why should one feel that he or she is inferior to any other person since he /she did not have the opportunity to study in an ivy league or could not bag the first or second rank or a first division in the academic grading. Life does not come to an end with your academic pursuit or by bagging a cushy job. Instead, institutions should find out how many students are happy and contented with the offers they have got and how they would be chalking out their career path in the given organization or any other organizations. Let  them also bring to the fore as to how many of the passed out students have opted for setting up a startup or pursuing a line of business of his/her  choice. 

I am not talking about progenies of businessmen and industrialists who will be stepping into their family business but those who are iconoclasts to consciously refuse a well-paying job to start something of their own. I sincerely feel that more the number of such people the better for the nation since they are the potential wealth creators.

Does it mean that we have to have a different approach while calibrating policies towards grooming up talents? I feel the sooner we do that the better. Otherwise, we may have to find recourse to number crunching while talking about creation of employment.  Let us look at how many times we have changed the goal posts. 

A few years ago, we embarked on creating 500 million jobs in the country to cover the backlog of unemployment and to provide employment to people who are joining the ranks every year. Could we reach anywhere near that? We also talked about skilling people to provide the right type of people to the industry, which is  constantly complaining  that they are not getting the right type of people to be employed. I may venture to point out that this approach is like distancing from reality. No educational institution can train students to suit job specifications of a particular industry or group of industries. It is for the industry to train them to mold them to their needs.

Let me take a common example. Construction sites are very common in every urban conglomerate. We have seen people of all types working there from highly skilled to unskilled people. One can notice two types of on-going work : sites that have a lot of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled people getting involved in various types of work depending on their level of skills. The other site, especially in larger construction sites, you can see only a few technicians and no workers per se because the work is done through prefabricated structures, wherein parts of the building  are made elsewhere and brought to the site and fabricated by pulling them with the help of cranes  under the supervision of engineers and technicians. 

One cannot see any semi or unskilled people there. The moot point is that with the technology keeping in pace, many people who were engaged earlier become redundant and they remain unemployed.

With the increased deployment of Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IOT), cloud computing etc. that is going to be more in the coming years. Human resources should not be treated like other factors of production such as land, technology and organization.  

In the challenging times ahead with the type of demographic pull that we have, we have to create ecosystems that address  such eventualities and find solutions to the challenges. For that, the first thing that we should realize is that mere rendition of demographic dividend without matching efforts is only rhetoric. I am sure that everyone is listening including the government and the industry.