| |9 December 2017HIGHERReviewsector was manufacturing, recruiting from the core branches of Civil, Elec-trical, and Mechanical. But, manu-facturing is stagnant at just 17 per-cent of the GDP. So the core branch placements have become very diffi-cult. The new mass recruiter is the IT sector. It grew from scratch to al-most 5 percent of the GDP in 25 yrs. IT employed millions of engineers. Now, IT is also coming to saturation, only good Skilled IT Engineers are in demand."If you look at the sectoral com-position of the Indian economy, most of the sector does not need engineers. Tourism is 10 percent of the GDP, does not require engineers. The fi-nancial sector, Trade, Hotels, and Restaurants do not require engineers and requirement in Health, educa-tion, Agriculture is also almost neg-ligible." says Madhavan Satagopan, Technology Advisor & Business Strat-egist, Cognitive and Human Intelli-gent Systems. So, essentially this is an unbal-anced equation where almost 50 per-cent of our economy has no role for engineers but that's what we are pro-ducing in bulk. The average salaries for entry-level engineers are close to Rs 2, 00,000-Rs 3, 00, 00 PA, which is hardly enough to sustain high rents in metros or to pay off their expensive education loads. "For the nation, you can calculate the loss. Leave around 1 lakh engineers that NASSCOM says are employable. The rest 14 lakhs have each wasted 10 lakhs of fees that total to around $ 20 Billion which is almost equal to the Government's spending on healthcare. Over this, there is the loss of human capital." explains Madhavan.An interesting plays itself out in the medical field where the quality of doctors has dipped the minute many medical and dental colleges started mushrooming. Incidentally, there is an acute shortage of nurses in In-dia, but most parents prefer to send their children to engineering or med-icine as they are more prestigious. So what's the solution to our situation?For starters, the decision to pur-sue a degree should be data-driven. We should have a system to under-stand where we need the key skills. This insight should be made available to all schools and parents so that they can make very informed decisions. Parents must be encouraged to stop having rigid mindsets and start ex-ploring alternate careers. This might require counseling and guidance from not only the school authorities but from central, state and local hu-man resources centers. The focus should be more on vocational train-ing at the Zila and village level. These students should be taught local skills so that they can support the local community and lead to its growth and development Education is a key sector for the growth and development of the coun-try. Unfortunately, we have a situa-tion where we need to fight this sit-uation with technology, with change management, and with data. But most importantly we need a mindset change that will fuel the growth for the next century. IT is also coming to saturation; only good skilled IT Engineers are in demand
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