Sunday Posts

I was in a debate not long ago on the topic whether For-Profit Higher Education should be allowed in India. In a way, I have a predictable position, given that I have spent most of my working life in For-Profit companies. But there are more reasons why I should generally answer in the affirmative to this question. First, because I always argue for diversity of provisions in the Education sector. Second, and more importantly, I believe that the government is generally incapable of providing services, and should confine itself to providing infrastructure and maintaining regulatory frameworks.  The aforementioned debate was conducted in equally predictable lines. There were some, arguing against For-Profit Higher Education, rooted their argument on a moral revulsion of Profit - that one should not be in education for making money! The other group, arguing in favour, was logic of the market - that it would improve access, bring innovation and enhance efficiency of the sector. The...

I have spent more than two decades exploring the Education/Employment divide.  Starting in 1995, when I signed up to set up networks of IT training centres across small-town India, I have been chasing this idea of seamlessly transitioning students from the world of learning to the world of work (a set of terms I picked up on the way). Along the way, I have spent time doing various kinds of training and education - IT Training (1995 - 2004), e-Learning (2004 - 2007), Language Training and Recruitment (2007 - 2010), Higher Education (2010 - 2012) and finally, Competency-based Higher Ed (2012 - 2015) - in various geographies in Asia and Europe. Of all these different experiences, being on the other side of the table - in global recruitment - perhaps had the most impact on how I think about the issue of Education-to-Employment transition. In fact, my engagements in Higher Education started precisely with this agenda - I was employed by a private Higher Education institution to build ...

Finally, the penny drops. The so-touted worlds most high profile skilling mission stumbles. After a highly critical audit report, several top executives of India's National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) resigned. The audit report highlighted a number of things, most crucially various areas of management failure, and that may have triggered the change. But it also crucially pointed out that more than 99% of all funding of this public-private partnership is coming from public funds, and there is indeed no accountability in how it is being spent.  In summary, the government has finally caught up with what almost everyone else knew. That the much vaunted skills mission was a non-starter, a colossal waste of public funds which made a few dishonest businesses rich. One could justifiably claim that this was one of the pet projects of the previous government, and they must shoulder the blame of its failure. And, they should, having set the body up without any plans and ideas. ...

A November day, U sual , it seems, Cl ouded sky and invisible Sun, Empty trees and their fallen leaves Sadness heaped, lying indifferently . But, is there a difference of order - Whether we pressed a button, Or they pulled a trigger, Whether they fired into a crowd, Or we bombed from the air, To look into the eyes of the dead, This morning-after, And to feel this stillness of bodies,  meaningless ends, Of the slain and the slayer.  There would be memories to deal with, And fears to overcome, Is this war inside us Making us less human. The battles that would follow, The promised heaven in return All be stained with indifference, And sadness overhung. So, this day, freeze, Remain with us as we live, The November day of indifferent death, And waste of all that could have been.

Disruption of higher education gets a lot of attention, and investment dollars. We say Higher Ed is broken, as costs rise and students end up unemployed, or underemployed. However, less mourned is the trouble another industry is in - Recruitment! As workplace transforms and talks of a superstar economy - one with less workers - gain traction, the neat business model of sourcing thousands of workers for a fee gets threatened. Of course, new possibilities are emerging - Headhunting is transforming into Talent Agencies - but those solution shops can not offset the coming loss of the bulk orders. Temp agencies too, with their time in the sun in the emerging economies now threatened by automation at the shop floor or service jobs, stand ripe for disruption. We talk about this less as this is not the usual public-to-private transformation that draws lot of investment. This is a classic disruption scenario. The recruitment arrangements have become dated, overtly expensive, as the profes...

I write, but one advice I have taken to heart is not to take my writing too seriously. That, I thought, is the best way to avoid any traps - from writing blocks to scholasticism - and be able to enjoy writing. This is exactly I did, on this blog, for the last ten years. I wrote as words came to me, and stopped, sometimes abruptly, just as one would do in conversations. It was difficult not to be conscious of those who might read it - I experimented with private blogs but the conversations felt unfulfilled without others - and over time, this put some constraints of subjects, what to say or not to say, all those little things about appropriateness. There was, however, somewhere a wish, a hope, that I can attempt a meaningful writing project someday. After ten years, I feel ready to try. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post announcing my intention to write about the death of Mahatma Gandhi ( see here ). Or, rather, what then started as a general enquiry into an imperfect but persistentl...

Can you be in the business of Education and stop selling courses?  It is a tough ask, as everyone in business has a course-fetish. Courses are the big hammers that the whole sector uses to solve the problems of the world. No matter what you come up with, the educator is likely to say - there is a course for that! We may not quarrel with the essential idea. Course stands to mean a route, or a procedure, originating from the Latin word for Run. But the course, as it appears in our jargon today, is a frozen thing, and means not a journey but rather a static feast of textbooks, lectures, assignments and exams.  Indeed, many people are dismayed by how it is usually done - often with little consideration or care for the person involved. However, course is such a common currency in education that, eventually, everyone seems to fall in the Course trap. It is so endemic that being educated and being Coursed (which indeed means chased) have become two different things alto...