Promote right knowledge for progress

In the early eighties, when Maruti Udyog Ltd, set up a factory in India, in collaboration with an automobile giant Suzuki, there was a limited knowledge in the country as far as new technology related to high speed, fuel efficient, small passenger cars was concerned. Within few years the country saw huge network of car workshops emerging-employing thousands of skilled workers and generating business worth hundreds of crores. In a very short time the technicians learnt the fool proof methods of servicing, repairing and trouble shooting the vehicles. Suzuki introduced new luxury car models and the same lot of technicians were able to absorb new servicing techniques quickly-in fact knowledge acquired previously was of great help. The same story was repeated in public telephone exchanges in early nineties as top multinationals brought their technologies and soon the telecom engineers and technicians were able to acquire knowledge related to operation and maintenance of new generation digital exchanges. There arecountless instances like this.

We must clearly distinguish between knowledge and education. A car technician with right knowledge is better off than a highly educated (unemployed) person. In spite of the fact that in terms of numbers we have a huge mass of educated people, the knowledge base in number of fields is low compared to other advanced countries. Although there has been an unprecedented growth in the number of technical and management institutes in the last few years, we are far behind in terms of knowledge base compared to global standards. This is largely due to a fact that our education system is highly teaching oriented.

Our successive National education policies have laid greater emphasis on increasing allocations for education sector. Higher allocations are definitely required for expanding the system but at the same time our policy maker should clearly understand that education alone won’t do unless a sufficient knowledge is generated in different spheres. In my opinion there would be basically two ways to achieve this goal:

Reorient higher education- Teaching in universities, professional colleges and institutes should be practice oriented. Students must come out from these places with armed with sufficient knowledge to make effective contributions in their respective fields.

Liberalise trade further-Great amount of knowledge is spread through trade. There can be no better example than the information technology sector. As the IT industry has grown since last ten years or so in the country, so has been the explosion in knowledge about computer, Internet new generation software etc.

Active linkages would be required between education and trade so that knowledge gained in a classroom is supplemented with the knowledge earned through experience and practice.

The writer isworking in a multi-national in Mohali