Two phrases to beware of in discussions on HRD policy are ’skill development’ and ‘public-private partnership’.
To understand why, just take a look at Latha Jishnu’s article in BS. ‘Skill development’ can easily become a substitute for a proper education, going all the way up to a university degree and, worse, it can mean creation of skills with limited earning potential. As for ‘public private partnership’ or even ‘private initiative’ in education, it could well mean that the government abdicates its role in education in favour of profit-seeking ventures in education that will, by definition, be non-inclusive in character.
On ’skill development’, Jishnu chronicles a recent Delhi initiative:
To ensure that such a lacuna should not reflect on its image as the capital of an economic superpower in the making, it launched the programme for skill development of domestic workers, a programme to turn out trained housemaids for the rich and the burgeoning middle class. And in this endeavour, it had impressive sponsors: the International Labour Organisation (ILO) no less, the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment and the Delhi government, all under the umbrella of the high-sounding National Skill Development Programme.
For the most part, domestic workers are poorly schooled or illiterate and their skill development consists of nothing more than a basic course in how to stay clean and speak well and learn to operate household gadgets. Part of the package is learning how to prepare an ‘urban meal’, serving food in a formal environment and handling domestic pets. All this would help in their ‘career progression’, we are told.
According to figures given by the government the demand for domestic servants is scheduled to grow six-fold to 600,000 in the next five years. That clearly is an underestimation. Even today, the average middle class home in the capital employs an average of 2.5 maids, apart from drivers and gardeners, according to another calculation. In coming years, the socialist republic of India would need, perhaps, two or three times that number of domestic helpers to serve its burgeoning middle class.
The focus on ’skill development’ coincides perfectly with the state truncating its obligation to provide quality school education.
There clearly is a vested interest in keeping the system thus. The debate on reforming the system, too, is skewed and dishonest. Those who advocate market-based solutions to the lack of schooling in India refuse to acknowledge that the common school system prevalent in the US, UK and other developed Western countries was vital in nation-building and building egalitarian societies.
All the solutions that are being suggested now, such as education vouchers that would allow the poor to send their children to a private school of their choice — one wonders at the choice that exists between non-functional government schools and profit-making private institutions that are just a notch above them — and the 25 per cent reservation in private schools for the poor are nothing but a deflection from the need to overhaul the grossly divisive and unequal system.
…In the intervening 45 years the gulf has only deepened. But if all of India went to the same kind of schools how would one get the endless flow of domestic helpers
