Engineers and beyond, the fundamental problem with India
It was around the period of the discovery of the New World, namely the continents of North and South America, that the Old World entered into its first race, involving mobilization and use of the diverse resources in the goldmines of the era, the colonies. This started up a period of long conflicts and events that finally ended with the world stepping into the Atomic and later, the Information age. The present era has been calling upon another large-scale turning point for humankind, with the seeds of this movement being sown ever since the Second World War, blooming in the 1980s and finally blossoming in the present. This turning point is none other than the generation of highly skilled personnel in abundant numbers in developing countries and the exodus of the said person to developed countries where their talents can be fully realized. However, are both sides truly winning in this exchange?
Although this article is mostly focusing on India, it is safe to say that the same can be applied to most Asian Countries. People of Asian origin are often thought of (to a comic effect) to be highly advanced in every imaginable sector than their Western Counterparts. What developing Asian Countries lack in terms of infrastructure, is more than compensated for by their desire and subsequent efforts to have a fulfilling life. In India, Engineering, Medical, and Government Services are the jobs most sought after. However, the latter two usually do not involve the outsourcing of personnel anywhere near the order of the first. Owing to its high student population, it is not surprising to witness high levels of competition among students to enter into the top colleges of the country, with studying in the IIT’s and NIT’s (Indian/National Institutes of Technology) being seen as a symbol of prestige and repute. Indian students are conditioned at a very young age to push beyond their limits and reach the very top rung of the ladder. Premier Schools and Coaching Institutes capitalize on this very notion. The ideology of the parents of these children is very simple, to get a fulfilling and safe future. The Indian Education System is highly unified, focusing on providing the resources for imparting skills to those who are going through it, however, it pays almost no heed to Critical Thinking and other aspects like Emotional Intelligence. This is done out of necessity as it is not feasible to pay individual attention to such a large pool of students.
More than 1.6 million students appear in the Joint Entrance Examination every year, a unified test to gain admission to nationwide colleges. Of these, only about 1 in 100 students are able to go to decent colleges with a good chance of having a good career. A third of these 16k students get to study in ‘good’ colleges, as in those which bring repute, and about a thousand reach the very top. Branch matters as well, and branches like Computer Science and Electrical Engineering usually have higher demand, and branches like Marine or Textile are suited for more niche operations.
This is where we address the problem, debunk the common stereotype about the academic excellence of Asian Students. What people of the west face is a selection bias, they only see the colloquial ‘cream of the top’ as the most refined products the Indian Education System has to offer. India’s Engineer Infrastructure and its school system have been stuck in a form of wretched stasis for a few decades. An unrelenting, undulating landscape which only selects the able-bodied and gives no chance of improvisation to those with unrealized potential. ‘Bleak’ would be a major undermining to the state of the current infrastructure of most Engineering Colleges, with the situation so severe that the number of colleges with good infrastructure would never cross the confines of the double digits. Most private engineering colleges are made with the intention of draining money from unsuspecting parents, with the diminished exchange of subpar infrastructure and a graduate with little to no skills. Such graduates are literally unemployable and become a liability, both to themselves and society since they aren’t able to function to their full potential. This takes a severe strain on their mental and emotional health as well as the psyche of their caretakers. It should come as no revelation that people in the age groups of 25–35 have the second-highest suicide rate in the country, falling behind the 15–18 age group, which gripes with a whole set of different problems relating to merciless academic pressure and competition.
This does not imply that the country has reached its maximum potential, it is nearly as far away from its zenith, as it was 5 decades ago. Indian Engineers have been behind most of the revolutionizing events throughout the information age. The late English Cosmologist and one of the most influential figures in popular sciences, Stephen Hawking, used software for speaking (a hybrid system of detecting brain patterns and suggesting words which would be selected via the action of a cheek muscle) prepared by two Indian Engineers Arun Mehta and Vikram Krishna. People of Indian Origin often occupy the top positions in corporations, with the position of the Chief Executive Officer in sector behemoths like Google, Microsoft, and recently, Twitter.
Critical Thinking and Emotional Intelligence are factors highly sought after by employers as they are abilities for which an aptitude is necessary and once found, can be chiseled to near perfection. Critical Thinking bestows the person in question the ability to identify problems and systematically neutralize them while being able to use available skills and resources in the best way possible, it also allows the creation of new ideas that can quite literally shape history itself. Emotional Intelligence yields mental resilience and is highly sought after in sectors like management. Cultivating these skills is more of a personal endeavor, as, unlike skillsets, these abilities cannot be acquired through a codified system. They are slowly cultivated with age, along with other abilities like rational thought and empathy.
While searching for a solution we must come in terms of the fact that the world we live in is not idealistic by any means. No sort of solution can ever triumph over the ‘human variable’. A system that does not account for unpredictability is a system that will never be feasible. There is no quick solution to the problem as well since it lies at the very core of the nation and its people. First of all, the government must increase funding to increase the quality of life and infrastructure as well as open up new engineering colleges throughout the country, mobilization of talent and its refinement cannot be done if there are no facilities to do so. The next step is to do a complete systematic overall of the education system in order to accommodate facilities that allow the development of individuals with rational thinking and analysis, tasks which would be unachievable by machine intelligence for a long while. Well-trained faculties and better facilities allow students to reach near perfection in terms of the peak they can achieve.
Reservations are only a short-term measure, in an ideal scenario there is no concept of being weak or underprivileged. Everyone has the right to live a fulfilling life and live without stress. Instead of the system focusing on only one side winning, in the future we should be able to reach closer to the ideal of a world where everyone is able to obtain peace, no matter the conditions set by their birth. We must strive to reach as close as we can to this ideal.
Considering the exodus of workers from the country, the same solution of providing suitable infrastructure and opportunities mitigates the need of going abroad, however, at the end of everything, it is the individual’s own choice and the final goal must be everyone’s satisfaction. A flower field is only beautiful when all the flowers are blossomed and healthy, not when most of them are wilted.
In the end, I would like to reiterate the first truth, the true ideal can never be reached owing to the very fundamental structure of the human psyche and the uncertainty observed in the world. We cannot make everyone happy, however, the least we can do is to try to create a smile on the faces of as many people as we can. After all, humankind is known for overturning the wheels of maligned fate.
