Nor can anyone dispute that one of the things we must expand is vocational education. Seventy per cent of those who graduate have degrees in Arts. One, they don’t want to do the sorts of jobs that are available. Two, employers have little use for them. Third, you can’t find a plumber¿ Krishan Khanna, an alumni of IIT, Kharagpur, an evangelist for vocational education, points to the telling contrast: India has about 5,000 ITIs (under the Ministry of Labour) and about 7,000 vocational schools (under the Ministry of HRD; and never the twain shall meet!); China has about 500,000 secondary vocational schools.

There can be no dispute about the need for expanding primary and vocational education, nor for the need to reorient them totally. It is the inference that is drawn, “IITs and IIMs are for the elite, higher education is for the elite,” which is errant nonsense. Higher learning, and the Research and Development work that can follow only from such higher learning are just as necessary. Not “Either/or”, as Vinoba would say, but “And also”.

The growing gap

We often pride and comfort ourselves with the observation, “We have one of the largest pools in the world of scientific and technical manpower.” But clearly, the numbers, large in absolute terms, are not large enough: look at the way salaries, even starting salaries have shot up in the last five years in IT, ITES and similar professions: they speak to a grave shortage.

... contd.