Mahmood Hassan
(He can be reached at mahmoodhassan61786@gmail.com)
The New Education Policy 2020 has proposed major structural changes into our education system. The revamping of the education system was long awaited. The focus on creativity and critical thinking will encourage decision making, innovative practices without class activities. Such revolutionary features are expected to bring about radical improvement from the age-old learning by rote introduced by the colonial masters. There will undoubtedly be a paradigm shift to Research and Development (R&D) and skill development. With a multi-disciplinary approach the students can choose their need based requirements of courses. Finally the policy makers have realised the futility of producing lakh of unemployed through a rigorous process of the examination system to be been done away with. Today India produces millions of useless employable graduates.
The NEP lays emphasis on research and innovation through start-up incubation centres, technology development centres, centres in frontier areas of research, greater industry-academic linkages and inter-disciplinary research including humanities/social science research. Setting up quality research institutions and promoting innovation, creation of new technologies, Research & Development (R&D) at university, state and national-level in all disciplines will be accorded priority under this policy. The present spending on education in India is merely 4.43% of the GDP.Whereas this policy aims to increase the expenditure up to 6% of the GDP. Whereas in R&D and innovations spending has been only 0.69% of the GDP unlike China where between 2000 and 2017 the country spent more than 17% of GDP. Hence as expected China is way ahead of other countries in this respect.
The draft policy proposes to set up an autonomous body called The National Education Technology Forum (NETF) for providing a free exchange of ideas and use of technology to improve learning, assessment, planning for school and higher education. The government is also planning to set up the National Research Foundation (NRF) to grant competitive funding for outstanding research proposals in all disciplines. It will aim to seed, grow, and facilitate research with proper mentoring by research scholars at top institutions of the country. The NRF will be given an annual grant of Rs 20,000 crore for research. Research Universities will dedicate in cutting-edge research for new knowledge creation with best quality teaching across all courses and disciplines. Today we are in need of extensive research on renewable energies and green technologies, drone, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, nano-technology, block chain technologies and internet of things, as well as 5G. China is leading in research in all these sectors and producing successful results.
In comparison to India, China is way ahead of in innovative technologies because of spontaneous development through R&D. The country is today the world's technological leader in many areas. They want to become world leaders in advanced manufacturing by 2035 in 5G, super computing, internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, autonomous vehicles, bio-tech and pharmaceutical sciences and other technologies of the fourth generation. The Soft Bank sponsors each and very Start Up and MSME sectors unlike India. Innovative consumer products displayed Alibaba or Amazon websites have created worldwide demand for those products. In India patenting of products is still a hard and arduous process. This is the reason that Padmashri awardee Uddhav Bharali, one of the leading innovators of India based in North Lakhimpur, laments that the government does not promote all his patented low-cost inventions. Till date he has more than 100 inventions to his credit and yet his product has not received attention of the companies that could easily find consumers all across India.
Countries like Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Singapore has also made rapid strides from the 1970s and 1980s to promote electronic goods as most of these countries do not have enough land for agriculture or any agricultural products. This has resulted in a huge export oriented market including India. Now India must concentrate to divert its Education policy towards production of youths enhanced with skills to promote electronic goods, consumer durables, automobiles, microprocessors, personal computers, hardware and heavy machineries that are heavy demand across the country. In 5G, the telecom of the future China's Huawei has put a strong challenge ahead of competition from Sweden's Ericsson, Korea's Samsung or Finland's Nokia. India must join the band wagon by promoting R&D in the sector extensively. Closing the doors of import of electronic consumers' items from China opens up a new vista for promotion of Indian products. But are we ready yet?
Today countries like China, Taiwan and South Korea has laid stress on creating skilful persons for construction of infrastructure apart from the prowess in electronics technology possessed by these countries. Today 95% of Korea's workers are vocationally qualified compared to India's mere 3%. There are a large number of vocational institutions in these countries producing engineers for specific jobs. One such job is construction engineers who are utilised solely for construction of buildings or roads or machines. So such a huge skill-gap has to be bridged through an aggressive strategy to bring down the unemployment rate in India vis-a-vis Assam.
Software genius NR Narayanamurthy in his book "A Better India a Better World' states that success of American industrialization can be attributed to the acceptance of 'new technology' industries. In recent times researches on the semi-conductor, information technology, biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries have yielded fruitful results. Stanford University has contributed in providing the technical expertise and skills in all the development of all these new technologies. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) solely incubates around 200 companies every year. A large number of options are open before today's generation to choose to study for obtaining a decent job. For example MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology at Bengaluru offers elective subjects like renewable energy, six sigma and automobile technology. In fact, BE degree has become more comprehensive as engineering courses is introducing innovative courses like mechatronics, engeneering, telecommunications, nanotechnology, mobile technology, microelectronics, microdevices, robotics, lasers etc.
The corporate giants of India must come forward to sponsor highly professional courses either through Public Private Partnership or by CSR. Collaboration should be encouraged by the State government with foreign universities to set up their campuses The vocational training institutes in the states are in poor shape need to be refurbished under PPP mode so as to develop them as skill development centres. The State government has already set up parks for industries, IT, bamboo, plastic, textile and jute which could be utilised for R&D and innovation purposes. A State Innovation and R&D Council can be created by Assam government based on the lines of the National Innovation Council to attract the young scientist to promote their products for use in the state. Such a vision will help what Ex-Presidents APJ Abdul Kalam defined as "ignited young minds" in their endeavours for a bright future.