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The government should establish a commission for 21st century skills to prepare a 15-year roadmap on transferable skills that can meet present as well as future demand from industries says a report.

The report titled ‘Skilling India – No Time to Lose’ by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) notes that rigid labour laws and poor infrastructure impede the pace of transition of the country’s labour force from informal to formal jobs.

According to the report India is trapped in a vicious cycle of low skills and a few good jobs. The combination of inadequately skilled workers obsolete labour laws a rising ratio of wages to the price of capital and persistent informality are resulting in fewer good formal jobs than India is capable of and badly needs it said.

The report suggests that the commission tasked with preparing the prospective plan for the period 2020-35 should comprise 4 or 5 knowledgeable persons who will reach out to central and state governments training providers companies and current as well as future workers.

“The Central and state governments should create appropriate incentives for workers to pursue such skills and make sure that labour markets are working efficiently” said the report in its policy recommendations for adapting and anticipating skills.

The report unveiled Tuesday also recommended improving the investment climate and ease of doing business.

It observed that India needs a trinity of unemployment benefits old-age pensions and health benefits so that a flexible labour market may be created.RIt points out that India faces the challenge of promoting the creation of more well-paying jobs including for women.

The other challenges include creating and regulating efficient pathways for skill acquisition and job matching to ensure workers have the right skills and employers find the right workers; and protecting the vast numbers of low-paid informal lowskilled workers with social protection benefits as they try to transition into better jobs.

Moreover the report calls for changing the country’s educational and training systems as quickly as possible to focus on quality adaptability and learning outcomes.

It recommends simplifying the skills definitions to make it easier to understand what is needed besides calling for a three-part framework comprising acquiring matching and anticipating skills for improving the country’s skilling ecosystem. Secretary in the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship K P Krishnan said the report can fulfill the need for addressing information asymmetry and creating a high quality labour market system to deal with the skilling challenges faced by the country.

“Another challenge is to create a consolidated regulatory system which brings together the currently fragmented skilling system at the Union level rather than through the functioning of multiple agencies. The goal is to bring down government regulation in private institutions in the skilling and educational ecosystem” Krishnan said at the launch.

India should adopt a three-part framework – acquiring matching and anticipating skills – for improving its skilling ecosystem an NCAER report said on Tuesday. NCAER (National Council of Applied Economic Research) is a New Delhi-based think tank.

This triad of acquiring matching and anticipating skills should be integrated into almost all policies and programmes and used to evaluate their utility and impact the report said.

Recommendations

Acquiring skills focuses on amendments needed in K-12 vocational and technical education and on-the-job training. Adoption of international learning standards and bringing changes in curricula and teaching practices in the Indian education system were some of suggestions in the report to achieve the desired results.

Call for commission

The report also suggested that the government set up a commission for 21st century skills. This is because the 21st century Indian worker will need transferable skills and there is need to create an agile workforce that can anticipate and adapt to changes in technology automation and digitisation. the report added.

Speaking at the report launch event KP Krishnan Secretary Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship said: “Vocational education and skilling in India is a concurrent list subject. the nature of activity is such that it requires local anchoring. We need to be clear that there is a role for Union States and local bodies.”

The report also highlighted that India is facing a skilling paradox as there are dwindling opportunities in agriculture. On the other hand there is much potential for jobs in manufacturing and services but there are not enough people with the right skills.

NCAER Director General Shekhar Shah said: “We need a 15-year perspective programme focussed on transferable skills that can meet the demand from the industries now and in the future.”

According to the report ‘Skilling India: No Time to Lose’ a combination of inadequately skilled workers out-of-date labour laws a rising ratio of wages to the price of capital is resulting in fewer good formal jobs than what India is capable of.

Using forecasting techniques Governments and industrial organisations around the world have made estimates of various social and economic parameters such as growth of future labour force population size et al. India must not lag behind

For the last decade or so the Government has been strongly encouraging the Indian firms to come up with indigenous innovations in product manufacturing and services. To promote innovation the policy-makers have made an attempt lately to increase India’s expenditure on Research and Development (R&D). However India’s expenditure on R&D is significantly below. It is just two per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) which is the benchmark value that most innovative countries spend on R&D.

Furthermore India never really made a forward-looking strategic plan to distribute this R&D expenditure on emerging issues of the future. As a result the country is usually a late entrant to new technology. By the time India musters the technological development process and is capable to put its imprint the world has moved up the technological ladder in the same or technological space moves in a different direction. Thus Indian firms find little space to enjoy the gains of innovation.

How is it that some industries and Governments in other countries are able to invest in the right area and at the right time? This is also true of smaller countries in the Far East like Korea and Taiwan. Do they follow a strategic plan to direct their R&D expenditure? Or is that there is a scientific way to identify the emerging technologies?

Over the years most countries have used forecasting as an important input in the process of planning future development. Using forecasting techniques governmental and industrial organisations have made good estimates of various social and economic parameters such as growth of the future labour force employment levels population size demographic distribution gross national product (GNP) et al. These forecasts were used as inputs for the decision-making processes.

Incidentally most innovating nations have effectively attempted to forecast the future of technology and deployed resources accordingly to gain from the first-mover advantage.

Technological forecasting (TF) principally deals with the prediction of the future of useful machines procedures or techniques. Thus TF can be considered as a system of logical analysis that leads to common quantitative conclusions about technological attributes and parameters as well as technical and economic attributes.

In other words technology foresight is a process by which one comes to a better understanding of the forces shaping the long-term future that should be taken into account in policy formulation planning and decision-making. Therefore it is closely tied to planning but it is not planning but merely a step in the process of planning.

Countries like Japan the United Kingdom France Germany and the United States are the forerunner in this discipline. For instance TF exercise in Japan involves more than 2000 top rated scientists/academia/technologists to map out the evolution of possible technologies in the next 25 years of the time horizon.

The latest exercise has listed out more than 400 technologies and there exists a strong lineage of these identified technologies with fund allocation for R&D by policy-makers.

Today everyone is amazed at the pace of technology development in China. A lot of it can be ascribed to TF exercises. Technology foresight in China in a broad sense can be traced to the 12 years of scientific development planning made in 1956 when over 1000 excellent scientists participated in works ranging from technology selection priority setting subject arrangement and resource distribution.

In 1983 the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) organised a large-scale survey on 15 years (1985-2000) of science and technology development planning with a view to make the disciplinary development strategy and sponsor policy which promoted the development of forecasting studies in China. In 2003 China launched the project ‘Technology foresight towards 2020 in China’ consisting of eight main research fields comprising 32 sub-fields and around 409 topics from the above 32 subfields. The academic team consisted of 60 top scientists from four research fields along with more than 320 scientists from 32 subfields.

The exercise has laid out emphatically top 10 topics based on the integrated index of importance which is calculated according to three indicators such as contribution to the economy improvement in the quality of life index and girding up the security system.  According to the integrated index of importance the most important topics for China are the following:

(i) The solar cell will be developed successfully whose transfer efficiency reaches as high as 50 per cent.

(ii) The new technology about biological energy will be developed successfully which can continuously produce ethanol with straw biological diesel hydrocarbon compound and so on.

(iii) The metal material obtains largescale use which is of high intensity and lightweight.

(iv) The most secure and cheapest control technologies of largescale electrical network obtain a widespread use;

(v) The technologies about biological processing and mining for crude oil develop successfully.

(vi) The anti-viral medicine with high efficiency applies to clinical medicine widely.

(vii) The technologies about biochemistry immunity and gene apply to food quarantine.

(viii) The important character gene which decides the yield quality and resistance of crops obtains comprehensive annotation and gets practical use with biological technology.

(ix) The 10nm processing technology obtains widespread usage in the scale production and integration rate of the integrated circuit achieves the 1000G transistor;

(x) The defence and monitoring system of harmful biology will be established for public security.

Similarly the most feasible 10 topics according to the integration of ‘technological possibility and commercial feasibility of technology’ topics are listed below:

(i) The important character gene which decides the yield quality and resistance of crops obtains comprehensive annotation and gets practical use with biological technology;

(ii) The measure of genome sequence about main economical plant and micro-organism will be completed;

(iii) The use of biological technology will speed up the process for breeding and the crops breeding will use the technologies of molecular design;

(iv) The epidemiology model and the trend analysis technology about main disease will be established;

(v) The rules of main metabolism network and metabolism regulation will be elucidated;

(vi) More than 300 animal models will be established with the technologies of biology model trans-gene and gene knock out;

(vii) The rubber with high performance obtains large-scale use;

(viii) The defence and monitoring system of harmful biology will be established for public security;

(ix) In order to eliminate the anxiety about transgene productions the standardised safe evaluation system which includes the technology for monitoring and examination of transgene biology will be established;

(x) The technology system of plant breeding and fertilisation which includes nitrogen fixation and high-use efficiency of elements such as nitrogen phosphorus and potassium and so on will obtain widespread use.

Thus one can see that TF exercise is a serious business in China. Moreover these have also been seriously debated in various fora. Unfortunately India has never attempted a serious endeavour of this kind barring half-hearted attempts made by the Technology Information Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC). So it is not surprising that India has not even been able to leapfrog in the technology front.

(The writter Sanjib Pohit  is Senior Fellow National Council of Applied Economic Research)

The most popular trend in the institution of marriage in India is a mix of a love and arranged match. Its implications need to be studied in depth

It is said that a successful marriage requires falling in love many times but always with the same person. This idiom can be interpreted in different ways in India where the practice of marriage is determined by diverse factors such as region religion ethnicity caste and socio-economic status among others. For a long time a majority of marriages were ‘arranged’ in large parts of the country which meant that parents and other family members played a prominent role in selecting spouses for their children who were usually neither expected nor encouraged to form a relationship or even an acquaintance with their potential partners before getting married. Indeed once the alliance was finalised the wedding was regarded as the beginning rather than culmination of the negotiations that the family members indulged in while formalising the union between the couple.

In recent times however there has been a move away from marriages in which the prospective couples play no role in spouse selection. Such a shift has been fuelled by rising levels of education growing urbanisation and increasing age at marriage. Print and visual media have also played a role as they popularise the ideal of exercising agency in partner choice. These trends in nuptial arrangements are also revealed by the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) a survey of over 40000 households undertaken jointly by the National Council of Applied Economic Research and the University of Maryland. During the first wave of the IHDS in 2004-05 less than five per cent of the ever married women respondents aged 25-49 years reported selecting their spouses on their own while around 60 per cent reported some participation in spouse choice along with parental intervention. This figure went up to 66 per cent in the second wave of IHDS in 2011-12 but the proportion of self-choice marriages remained constant at five per cent.

Although the element of choice is emerging as a distinctive feature of marriages in the country the percentage of women who have had the opportunity to meet and get acquainted with their husbands at least a month before the wedding is modest. Indeed 65 per cent of the surveyed women reported that they met their husbands for the first time on the day of the wedding itself. Do self-choice marriages offer women greater autonomy than parent-arranged marriages? One way to assess this is in terms of the decision-making authority women have post their marriage.

In the IHDS women’s autonomy is measured in terms of their ability to take certain decisions in the household viz purchase of expensive items treatment of a sick child number of children to have and selecting a spouse for the child. Such an analysis is relevant because empirical evidence indicates that women in India like their counterparts in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh have limited say in household decision-making. Research indicates that women in self-choice marriages have more authority as compared to those who married according to their parents’ wishes. Interestingly however even in arranged marriages women gain autonomy over time gradually catching up with women who selected their marital partners.

Another key question is: Are marriages of choice characterised by greater longevity than marriages bound by convention? In an article titled “Modern Lessons from Arranged Marriages” in 2013 The New York Times pointed out “whether arranged marriages produce loving respectful relationships is a question as old as the institution itself. In an era when 40-50 per cent of all American marriages end in divorce some marriage experts are asking if arranged marriages produce better relationships in the long run…than those in which people find each other on their own and romance is the foundation”. In fact Robert Epstein a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavior Research and Technology in California avers that the key to the success of arranged marriages in India lies in parental intervention with parents “screening for deal breakers” while anticipating and preventing anything that could go wrong in advance to drive the couple apart.

However the jury is still out on the criteria for evaluating the quality of marriage as decision-making authority and longevity are only two of the many aspects that influence marital relationships. Keera Allendorf a sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington who studies marriages in India and Nepal too argues that marriages must be assessed on parameters relevant to the local cultural context. Clearly the popular marriage type in India is a hybrid that has the characteristics of both love and arranged marriages. What are the implications of this trend for the institution of marriage and for society at large? It seems demographic surveys on marriage in the country have hitherto only touched the tip of the iceberg and need to venture deeper into uncharted territory.

(The writers Anupma Mehta and  Manjistha Banerji are associated with the National Council of Applied Economic Research. Views expressed in this article are personal)