Industry picking up the slack from ‘failing’ HE – Tharoor

India’s higher education system is failing graduates by not teaching them the skills that would make them employable, and the gap is being filled by industry, new Minister of State for Education Shashi Tharoor said on Monday in his first public speech since being assigned to the ministry in a wide-ranging cabinet reshuffle.

“What is one of the unreported stories of the employment market [in India] is that companies like Tata and Infosys are actually hiring people they do not consider to be at par and then training them,” Tharoor said at a higher education conference in New Delhi organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, FICCI.

“These companies have set up campuses to make up for the education deficiencies of [the] qualified graduates they hire…our education system simply isn’t producing enough well-educated graduates to meet the needs of Indian companies today, let alone for their planned growth tomorrow,” Tharoor told the two-day gathering of academics, industry leaders and international delegates, which began on 5 November.

India is aiming for a higher education enrolment rate of 30% by 2020. Although India, with 621 universities and 33,500 colleges, has one of the largest networks of higher education institutions in the world and is second globally in terms of student enrolment, only 18.8% of students accessed higher education in 2011 compared to the world average of 26%.

Citing a survey by the regulatory body, the University Grants Commission (UGC), of 1,471 colleges and 111 universities, Tharoor said 73% of colleges and 68% of universities were found to be of medium or low quality.

He also said that a FICCI survey in 2009 revealed that 64% employers were only ‘somewhat satisfied’ with the quality of graduates coming out of the country’s engineering institutes.

The junior education minister argued that the entry of foreign universities would address the issue and promised to pursue legislation currently pending in parliament to allow foreign universities to operate in India, which could double higher education capacity in the country.

This is the first public indication that the ministry under newly assigned Human Resources Development (HRD) Minister MM Pallam Raju will continue attempts to push pending bills through parliament rather than abandoning them in the face of criticism from opposition parties as well as some members of the current ruling coalition.

Although former HRD minister Kapil Sibal initiated several reforms during his tenure in cabinet, he was unable to build the consensus required to pass the legislation in the fractious Indian parliament.

Out of step with time

“Our national education policy in the past has remained out of step with time. Whereas countries in the Middle East and China are going out of their way to woo foreign universities to set up campuses in their countries, India has turned away many academic suitors who had come calling in recent years,” Tharoor said.

“Those Indians who choose to study abroad often get scholarships to do so. Currently there are 90,000 of them in the United States alone.

“They would not need to go abroad if we opened up higher education space in our country and authorised setting up double the number of universities than [what] we currently have by recruiting some qualified foreign providers,” said Tharoor, reiterating what Sibal said in the past.

India has a few world-class institutions including the renowned Indian institutes of technology and Indian institutes of management, he said “but these are still islands in the sea of mediocrity”.

“My government will pursue [the] bills in parliament so as to change the regulatory and governance structure of our higher education system in a way that promotes innovation and creativity rather than simply produce graduates who are largely unemployable,” Tharoor said.

Tharoor’s international profile – as former United Nations under-secretary general and a former minister of state (junior minister) for external affairs – will ensure a buzz around the HRD ministry, as he is expected to be an erudite speaker both in parliament and on the international stage.

But some have questioned whether he has the parliamentary experience to clear 20 pending education bills including 11 dealing with various reforms in higher education.

In an interview with the television news channel IBNLive, Tharoor expressed confidence in the ability of his boss, new HRD Minister MM Pallam Raju, to get the bills passed – but he also admitted that the prospect of pushing them through parliament was “daunting”.

Tharoor added, “I think the team can rise to it”. He described Raju as “a very experienced political hand. He’s had 23 years in parliament, he knows the lay of the land, he knows how to get things done politically, and I think he will be an enormous asset at a time when so many of ours bills are pending, for example, in parliament.”