Learning to learn

Never in the history of India have individual workers been so important as today

India will remain a low-income country for several decades with per capita income well below its other BRIC peers, says a recently-released paper by Goldman Sachs, simultaneously pointing out that it can become a motor for the world economy. But for that to happen, we will have to increase its efficiency or productivity. And there lies the key 8212; the India of tomorrow can8217;t be built on foundations of yesterday. The one resource that needs to be given policy respect: Knowledge. It is the one word which the past week saw Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, and National Knowledge Commission NKC chairman Sam Pitroda stress. The Singh-Kalam-Pitroda combine is powering the bandwagon of societal change just as it is beginning to move: the creation and maturing of India into a knowledge society, a process that began in the early-1990s as Singh opened the economy sector by sector, clause by clause.

A decade and a half later, as captain of a ship with many sails to open before it cruises at double-digits, Singh is recognising that if the ship has to power ahead, its oarsmen at the bottom need to be empowered with muscles of knowledge. A social infrastructure has to be put in place, using which the marginal farmer or farm worker who moved as domestic help and physical labourer to the city then squeezed his way as a contract worker into a factory and signed into a union register as a permanent worker, can take the next step of becoming a skilled worker and as a collective transform India into a knowledge society.

While the complete evolution will take another decade or two 8212; more if a fractured politics continues to trip any forward-looking moves 8212; can we ignore the vast majority living beyond the metros or in their backyards, who are reaching out to us through our mobile phones, offering products and services we don8217;t need, taking our condescending-to-appalling attitudes in stride? How many of them really need us, I wonder 8212; the world waits for them as armed with the latest weapons of mass survival, knowledge and skill they tune into and service consumers from other nations. The talent here is the ability to learn a new language English today, French, German or Japanese tomorrow, speak it with the right attitude and twang, and market products of companies unseen. This is just one example of how average Indians can, have and are using knowledge 8212; taxi drivers, fishermen, lay investors using sophisticated derivatives.

But if Kalam sees the trickling down of knowledge to villages through e-enabled education, healthcare, governance, and Singh believes that India is 8220;on the threshold of a new era of knowledge-based development8221;, just what is this development, this enabling? Are we to assume that thus far India was an ignorant society and will transform while going forward? How did India, the epicentre of wisdom from whose womb knowledge, information and data were born, turn ignorant? Finally, as most current discourses on knowledge seem to indicate, knowledge is the creation, use, application, adoption of technology 8212; computing, genetics, pharmaceuticals, research and so on 8212; are we to assume that knowledge begins and ends with technology?

I8217;m afraid not. Technology may be the loud, aggressive, hugely financed front-end of this process, but a knowledge society is more. It is a process that transforms an agrarian-manufacturing-services society into one in which the three sectors are influenced and strengthened by knowledge, through increased productivity. Since technology is constantly changing, constantly evolving, a knowledge society would be one where its people have in them the one ability, the one technology that can8217;t turn obsolete: learn to learn. If we have any hopes of becoming a knowledge society, the change has to come at the very roots 8212; primary education, which again has to look beyond an ancient syllabus, antique curriculum, apathetic teachers into a future that stands on two boats of teaching and learning simultaneously.

We also have to inject policy decisions with knowledge. How can any policymaker having studied 60 years of failure in trying to 8216;uplift8217; the backwards, for instance, continue with and magnify reservations? How can leaders having seen the failure of primary school education delivery keep harping on creating more schools? This is not to say that those left out of mainstream should stay there or more schools should not be set up. This is to question whether those attempting to transform India into a knowledge society are themselves using knowledge to take decisions or are they, like their predecessors, taking the easy, frictionless, effortless, useless, inertia-laden way, using hands rather than minds.

To say that India is too large a country, too large a population and hence the power of scale is necessary to deliver returns even if they accrue to a few, is an approach incongruent with the society of tomorrow. These are yesterday8217;s brute solutions. As is the process of defining a person as knowledgeable based on the degrees he carries. Ask the HR departments of any organisation and the one refrain you8217;ll hear is, 8220;educated, yes; employable, not necessarily8221;. Again, while employment or economic utility is neither the only nor the most desirable way to define uses of knowledge, as a first step, it won8217;t hurt to transfer what is seen as education and dissemination of knowledge to its end users 8212; most knowledge-intensive companies are already investing in the education of their employees through executive development and distance education programmes.

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Finally, the knowledge created and organised in policy towers, used by mega corporations by those privileged to have access to it, must finally turn a full circle and return through factories, small-sector outfits right back to agriculture and, by turning them productive, change the very nature of societal organisation, in which knowledge workers functioning on elite fringes of India today grow into a large, intelligent constituency of specialists. This constituency, which owns the tools of post-capitalist production but needs new capitalism8217;s organisations to function effectively, may not vote, but will definitely lead the country. Never in the history of India have individual workers been as important as today. Individual dispensability has morphed into collective indispensability. The knowledge step that we need to take today and policy-makers have to enable is to broaden that collective indispensability and make it reach the last Indian citizen.