India has spent a decade wasting the potential of its young population
qz.com
qz.com
And their answer to basic inefficiency and ineptness is - imperialism. A lot of Indians still see imperialism as the reason why millions of people in their country still living without electricity or basic sanitation. It’s funny I was talking to my uncle the other day and he was pointing out how many railway lines in rural India had basically zero upgrades since the British left. Politicians across the board are all corrupt and inept.
Well here is a new kind of imperialism. Thousands of smart and wealthy Indians emigrate every year. What would take the west millions of dollars to produce and retain such talents, they get it for free. Why rule India when you can just get the wealth transfer indirectly. Look at all the F50 CEOs.
All bureaucrats, police, military, even the first Prime minister Nehru was an imposition on the country. You are right about the bureaucracy, its culture is a continuation of a colonial legacy.
We need to rapidly decolonise, simplify our laws and constitution. Brain drain is not about people leaving the country, it is about people staying back do not get utilised properly, what can they aspire for?
At best an IAS, we need more industries, engineering, design, higher standards of education, fundamental research.
My general disposition is that very few nations have done a good job of giving youth access to use their potential. The future/present feels perenially squandered on those already here.
We were in the middle part of the S curve, and have reached the top due to reduction in population growth rates and other natural constraints, hence the reduction in “ramps”.
There's a lot of social discrimination in several domains going on that is fueled by the core old traditional culture values. Which is then exploited heavily by politicians for short term gains.
One needs to realize why do Indians succeed only after they leave the country for some foreign land?
About two decades ago, rapid globalisation opened up the Indian market. The kids coming out of the education system were fluent in reading & written English (We can thank the Macaulay plan in late 1800s for that). The world was moving towards interconnectivity. The government gave its blessing by allowing setting up of thousands of IT training colleges to feed the global markets. It was seizing on the strengths of language & communication abilities vis-a-vis other Asian countries. By 2007-08, close to 200 engineering colleges were operating in each Indian state in addition to the state universities. This created a great boom for forex, rapid social mobility & better living standards as compared to the 80s.
In parallel, other educational disciplines however suffered greatly. If 10 million kids were seeking admission to IT & engineering as first preference, the not-so-fortunate ones were mostly left to seek out arts & commerce streams. Government-sponsored research remained laggard without any new scientific agency. IITs, the flagship of Indian tech education were diluted to accommodate more students, yet funding remained at best constant for IISc & TIFR, the flagship institutions of basic sciences. This was a shortsighted move. The IT wave should have created wealth that could be channeled to improve the education standards across the board & fund more research. Indian education system completely missed this memo - as a result of which Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand will eat their lunch in coming years. The IT education/training today itself has significant variance, which has lowered industry trust in their capabilities. The vagaries of oversupply [1]
India has created an army of IT professionals but not invested in making quality scientists or researchers. The ones who do, eventually seek greener pastures in developed countries. They will have to depend on R&D done in US/EU to serve their long term goals in the years to come. This is the exact model China observed and learned to avoid. They invested in research, lured back a lot of their talented researchers & computer scientists. They built up a industry with strong foundations. The current AI boom in Chinese economy is completely home-grown & self-sustained. As an expat it pains me to see this glaring miss.
In tandem, people have become increasingly frustrated with the rapid unsustainable urbanization (in cities such as Hyderabad & Bangalore). I disagree somewhat with other comments regarding governance: People are joining civil services out of a mission to change the status-quo. The young turks now are better than the generation before them. They are computer savvy, from educated households, less corrupt and more tolerant to class & caste divides. But the lumbering bureaucratic machinery is too slow to cater to rapidly changing socioeconomic definitions. A significant chunk of India's demographics is young working population. Opportunities to work in offshore IT position or meteoric salary growth reminiscent of dotcom-era are dwindling steadily. Discontents have given rise to social tensions & intolerance.
Added to that mix is the local politics which has polarized people on the basis of religion & indoctrinated them to some degree to be either be pro-Hindu or anti-Ruling party. Secularism is a dangerous and disbelieved term. Our society has missed teaching valuable traits of tolerance, fact-finding and fraternity to the people running the show.
It is a decade of missed opportunities
1. https://www.hackerearth.com/blog/talent-assessment/90-indian...