How to convert Indian population from burden to workforce
For decades, I have noticed several Indian citizens, especially from unorganized workforce (such as laborer, carpenter, masons, plumbers etc.), as well as some people with higher degree, set out to opt for jobs outside India. In most of the cases, these people either did not get their preferred job in India or lost their jobs due to some reason, set aside some cases where people opt to earn more money than they get in domestic market. And there is an unscrupulous business organized by several brokers who operate internationally who literally traffic these aspiring candidates to countries like middle east and western Asian countries. In many cases, these people get least of what they are promised before they leave India. And after they leave their country, least Govt. of India can do in favor of them and rest of the things come in news as discrete instances.
Another problem I see in India is that, while being student, they hardly know what kind of skill sets India would be requiring in future when they would come up as a workforce to open market. During some decades in the past we have seen a surge of IT batches of students coming out of college without knowing how much workforce IT industry really require.
Now can we not set up some in-house workforce management department from government side where two of the above problems will be addressed in an integrated manner? This department would have 3 major responsibilities.
The first is to estimate what skills we would be requiring during the next 10 years and in what capacity, being in-line with the current and near future and far future plans the nation has so far. Accordingly, it will publish its report to grow an awareness which both the academic authorities as well as the students would align themselves with. Even the present professionals also may consult it to realign their skill-sets to be more fit for the future.
The second responsibility is to have some professional courses for current professional to help them realign with future needed skills. This can help this department to earn from it to run itself independently.
The third responsibility would be to have an employment facility which would help aspiring candidates from all levels to get jobs. This department would facilitate candidates with collaborations with domestic as well as overseas recruiting organizations. This may operate in two modes such as, one would be simple body-shopping where candidate will be recruited by this department and will be sent for part-time engagements. The other mode will be facilitating organizations to get to the right permanent candidates.
Now the benefits are many folds, such as:
1.      It would help us to have an assessment of the pattern and capacity of workforce we need to rebuild India. If Indian people are ready with the skills India require at any point in time in the future, it would be a wonderful independent growth for both its people as well as this country. We would save on extra import cost of expertise from abroad.
2.      There are millions of people in this country who does not know what to do in their life and they do the same things which they see people doing around them. Many places you would find quite a few independent grocery shops are in the same locality and they are all completing with each other, as they don’t know what else they might have done. They saw one person doing profit out of this business and they all started following the same path without understanding that they all work on a same local customer base which consumes a fixed quantity of groceries per month. And I feel their effort is not effective and should be avoided to continue like this as this does little value addition in bigger sense.
Rather if this department can reach out to these segments of people to make them aware of the diverse possibilities of business they may take part and that too being aligned with the future trend, it would be both beneficial to them as well as the country.
3.      When a candidate goes for an overseas assignment, being registered with a department of its domestic government, it would be safe, legal as well as traceable so that no more cheating happens to Indian citizens overseas.
4.      Academic bodies also can plan how many number of seats they would carry for each of its departments each year so that we never see another surge of resources with skills which we don’t require in that capacity (as it happened in IT). Also this will help to have our social structure and hierarchy to become balanced once more so that we don’t see a highly educated candidate roaming jobless because of the fact that he is specialized in a specific skill which people no more require.
Think of a situation where it would be known that we currently have so many number of mechanical engineers on ground and we are almost saturated, so we cut down on the seats in the mechanical engineering department in academic universities so that actual skill capacities match with the country’s requirements.
5.      This is a big country in terms of population, and it is very difficult to provide good jobs to each one of these people. So instead of people being frustrated siting jobless in domestic market, if this department can arrange jobs to them to work abroad with an assurance from its government, it would attract quite a large number of people. Of course, this has to be regulated so that we don’t allow all our workforce dissolved abroad and we starve in India. And the contracts will be time-bound so that in timely basis, we get them back. And most importantly, when we get them back in domestic market, we would not need to train them as they would come home with some good exposure and work experience which would be so useful to grow India independently.
6.      This department would build Indian skill set in a regulated manner so that India import less foreign skills, grow the same in-house from granular levels, send its people to the world to learn in world standards, and bring the expertise home to contribute to its domestic growth.
I hope you would foresee many more opportunities this might open up. We already have a national skill registry which registers professionals with the skill-sets. We can add onto it and grow it to this level to know what skills we currently have. We can do some statistical projections upon what we would require to support our growth plans. We can then start building our people effective for our country so that we utilize our big population and convert it from a burden to a motivated work-force which would make it in India, as well as outside India. That collectively would make India a super power nation in future.