Just as the licence-quota raj created self-inflicted scarcities of telephones, scooters and cooking gas, our utterly authoritarian, cynical and intellectually bankrupt higher education policy has created humongous shortages. We all know the odds for a candidate to qualify for premier engineering, management and medical colleges. Those with means now pay their way to colleges in Australia, Singapore, Qatar, besides indeed the traditional “exporters” of education to India, the US and the UK. Various estimates put just the cost on Indian parents of educating their children abroad between $5 billion and $6 billion per year. This is an entirely one-way trade, as very few foreign students come to study in India, and some of those who wish to, like researchers, even Fulbright scholars, are given hell by our Orwellian (or you could coin an Indian equivalent, Arjunian, Murlimanoharian) HRD establishment. Where does it leave the poor who can’t afford to buy their children seats overseas? Where does it leave Indian enterprise and industry — even the government, its armed forces, hospitals, PSUs — which can’t find enough skilled manpower and therefore have to pay exaggerated wages, distorting all economics?

Yet, do advertise for a security guard on naukri.com and see how many applications you get from MAs, MScs, even PhDs. These are young Indians who have invested the most valuable years of their lives collecting degrees but no knowledge, education but no skills. Unless this disaster is stemmed now, these numbers will multiply faster than you can imagine, and they will be angrier than you wish to imagine. But if you can fix it, the dividend you reap will be not merely demographic, but even economic and political.

... contd.